Heading into the semifinals, Margulis thought the match would “maintain its personal” in opposition to the NFL, noting, “We noticed this as certainly one of our premium championships that we’re attempting to develop.”
The semifinals and finals each passed off in Tampa—fairly the space from the colleges’ properties in Lincoln and Austin—and each set attendance data. A gathering of 19,727 followers grew to become the biggest crowd to ever attend an indoor NCAA volleyball match, breaking a file set days earlier than.
Along with serving to set the indoor volleyball attendance file, Nebraska’s volleyball staff additionally set the world file for ladies’s outside occasion attendance earlier within the yr, with 92,003 folks piling into Memorial Stadium to look at the Cornhuskers beat Omaha.
Simply the beginning
The trajectory of volleyball’s recognition has been straightforward to hint, and far of it comes from elevated broadcasting of the game throughout media companions like ESPN and Fox.
In keeping with Margulis, Covid-19 helped speed up the expansion of girls’s volleyball when all the match passed off in Omaha. ESPN seen the 2020 match as a method to leverage then-fledgling ESPN+.
Within the following yr, each sport within the early rounds was obtainable on the platform to extend publicity of the game, with the corporate additionally taking care to current matches in one of the simplest ways.
“We get challenged quite a bit within the first and second rounds, ‘Why don’t you set extra video games on linear?’ And I counter that they’re normally a blowout,” mentioned Margulis.
To current early rounds in a fan-friendly means, ESPN developed a whip-around present, The fifth Set, which returned for a second straight yr in 2023.
In the meantime, Fox’s Huge Ten Community has additionally recurrently aired volleyball matchups in primetime on Saturday nights (drawing extra viewers than Huge Ten soccer in some instances). The community has additionally discovered success with Sunday afternoon video games on Fox alongside the NFL in October, which not too long ago set the common season viewership file by averaging 1.66 million viewers, tripling the file that had been set simply weeks earlier than.
On this yr’s match, all the regionals aired on linear (ESPN2 and ESPNU), with the semifinals touchdown on ESPN and the aforementioned championship broadcasting on ABC. However even within the common season, ESPN noticed viewership success, upgrading 20 matches to greater networks—two of them twice.
“We pushed this yr, and growing the general viewership of normal season volleyball actually helps,” Margulis mentioned. “It’s an total funding sport.”
Volleyball is the third girls’s faculty championship ESPN has broadcast on ABC, all to resounding success.
The NCAA girls’s basketball remaining in April averaged 9.9 million viewers—essentially the most ever. Moreover, April’s 2023 NCAA Gymnastics Championship averaged 1.02 million on ABC, 10% greater than 2022’s, which had set the prior file.
