Heading into the semifinals, Margulis thought the match would “hold its own” against the NFL, noting, “We saw this as one of our premium championships that we’re trying to grow.”
The semifinals and finals both took place in Tampa—quite the distance from the universities’ homes in Lincoln and Austin—and both set attendance records. A gathering of 19,727 fans became the largest crowd to ever attend an indoor NCAA volleyball match, breaking a record set days before.
In addition to helping set the indoor volleyball attendance record, Nebraska’s volleyball team also set the world record for women’s outdoor event attendance earlier in the year, with 92,003 people piling into Memorial Stadium to watch the Cornhuskers beat Omaha.
Just the start
The trajectory of volleyball’s popularity has been easy to trace, and much of it comes from increased broadcasting of the sport across media partners like ESPN and Fox.
According to Margulis, Covid-19 helped accelerate the growth of women’s volleyball when the entire tournament took place in Omaha. ESPN viewed the 2020 tournament as a way to leverage then-fledgling ESPN+.
In the following year, every game in the early rounds was available on the platform to increase exposure of the sport, with the company also taking care to present matches in the best way.
“We get challenged a lot in the first and second rounds, ‘Why don’t you put more games on linear?’ And I counter that they’re usually a blowout,” said Margulis.
To present early rounds in a fan-friendly way, ESPN developed a whip-around show, The 5th Set, which returned for a second straight year in 2023.
Meanwhile, Fox’s Big Ten Network has also regularly aired volleyball matchups in primetime on Saturday nights (drawing more viewers than Big Ten football in some cases). The network has also found success with Sunday afternoon games on Fox alongside the NFL in October, which recently set the regular season viewership record by averaging 1.66 million viewers, tripling the record that had been set just weeks before.
In this year’s tournament, all of the regionals aired on linear (ESPN2 and ESPNU), with the semifinals landing on ESPN and the aforementioned championship broadcasting on ABC. But even in the regular season, ESPN saw viewership success, upgrading 20 matches to bigger networks—two of them twice.
“We pushed this year, and increasing the overall viewership of regular season volleyball really helps,” Margulis said. “It’s an overall investment sport.”
Volleyball is the third women’s college championship ESPN has broadcast on ABC, all to resounding success.
The NCAA women’s basketball final in April averaged 9.9 million viewers—the most ever. Additionally, April’s 2023 NCAA Gymnastics Championship averaged 1.02 million on ABC, 10% more than 2022’s, which had set the prior record.
