LOUISVILLE, Ky. – What’s remarkable isn’t that two women will coach to the national championship and one will win a title for the first time in 44 years of NCAA women’s volleyball. It’s notable that these women, Katie Schumacher-Cawley and Dani Busboom Kelly, are the two doing it.
Because they are the ideal representatives.
In this historic moment, as Penn State’s Schumacher-Cawley and Louisville’s Busboom Kelly face off in front of a sold-out KFC Yum! Center and a national ABC audience on Sundays at 3pm, they are the embodiment of what it takes to reach the top in a male-dominated industry.
Eighteen of the 20 winningest coaches in Division I women’s volleyball history are men.
“It will be great for the sport to get this monkey off its back and move on, where it’s not historic for a woman to win,” said Busboom Kelly, 39, in her eighth season and making a second trip to the nationals championships. championship game with the Cardinals. “It’s just a normal thing.”
Penn State (34-2) and Louisville (30-5) reflect the drive and resilience of their coaches. They won national semifinal games in dramatic fashion against Nebraska and Pittsburgh, respectively, on Thursday.
Schumacher-Cawley and Busboom Kelly both coached with a steady hand. They carried confidence from the sidelines as their teams staged comebacks against opponents ranked first and second nationally in talent, depth and championship-level experience.
GO DEEPER
Penn State, Louisville will compete for the women’s volleyball national title
The Nittany Lions pulled off a five-set reverse sweep, fighting off two match points for Nebraska in the fourth set.
Early in the deciding fifth set, junior libero Gillian Grimes heard a reassuring voice in the Penn State huddle: “We were built for this.” The phrase did not come from Schumacher-Cawley. But she is the reason it was spoken.
Louisville players were under pressure all season to earn a spot in the Final Four at home. As the tension mounted as Pitt won the opening set and took the lead in the second, Busboom Kelly implored the Cardinals to remain calm.
“This is going to start working,” she said.
Without star forward Anna DeBeer, the senior was injured two points in the fourth set. They swarmed Pitt after putting back three set points for the Panthers in the third.
In short, Penn State and Louisville refused to go away. They continued to make huge swings. They played to win.
“We’re not talking about ever losing,” Penn State outside hitter Jess Mruzik said. “We never count ourselves out, no matter how big the deficit.”
In games played before an NCAA postseason record crowd of 21,726, Penn State and Louisville were the tougher teams.
Is this a surprise, considering the coaches?
“Women are tough,” said Nebraska coach John Cook, who has won four national championships. “And those two are really tough. Think of them as players. They’ve both won national championships, so this isn’t a fluke. These guys are winners. They are great competitors. And their teams play like that.”
Schumacher-Cawley, 44, is a cool brand from Chicago. She grew up in the city and played in multiple sports at Mother McAuley High. She played at Penn State, earning two All-America honors and winning a national championship, the school’s first in women’s volleyball, in 1999 for coach Russ Rose.
Rose won six more titles. He is the all-time leader in championships and wins among Division I coaches. In 2008, Schumacher-Cawley was inducted into the Chicagoland Hall of Fame in a class alongside Dick Butkus, Gale Sayers and Andre Dawson.
She led the program for eight seasons at Illinois-Chicago and returned to Penn State to work for Rose in 2018 – four years after the Nittany Lions’ most recent Final Four appearance until last week.
Schumacher Cawley took over when Rose retired in 2022.
“Following Russ Rose’s lead, to take the team back to the Final Four in just three years,” Busboom Kelly said, “it’s a tremendous achievement to not be a man or a woman with it anymore.”
Early in her third season this fall, Schumacher-Cawley revealed a stage 2 breast cancer diagnosis and began chemotherapy. She lost her hair, but didn’t miss practice with her team.
“We obviously want to do this for her because she’s been so great all season,” said Mruzik, who had a team-best 26 kills against Nebraska. “So that gritty five-set win helped put another brick in the piece we’re trying to build this season.”
Schumacher-Cawley dodges questions about her health and the gender issue in coaching.
“I’m just really excited to represent Penn State,” she said.
Perhaps it will sink in, she said, to the magnitude of two women on the bench, both burdened with a trophy on the field, when they step out under the lights on Sunday.
“I am proud of this team,” said Schumacher-Cauley. “I think I said that every day. I am proud of their fight.”
The battle transcends volleyball.
Louisville coach Dani Busboom Kelly was the 2021 AVCA national coach of the year. (Sam Upshaw Jr. / Courier Journal / USA Today via Imagn Images)
When Busboom Kelly took over at Louisville in 2017, she doubled the Cardinals’ win total, from 12 to 24, in a single season.
In 2019, Louisville advanced to the eighth round for the first time. In 2021, Busboom Kelly was named national coach of the year, as the Cardinals went undefeated until the Final Four, losing to Wisconsin in five sets. A year later, Texas defeated Louisville for the national championship.
“She has led one of the great changes in any college volleyball program,” Cook said.
Busboom Kelly played for Cook at Nebraska from 2003 to 2006. He recruited her to a ranch near Cortland Neb. She was a multi-sport star at small Adams Freeman High School.
In college, she switched from setter to libero and helped the Huskers, along with future Olympians Jordan Larson and Sarah Pavan, to a national championship in 2006. She won another title with Cook and the Huskers as an assistant coach in 2015 .
A year later, she took over at Louisville.
“I hope people appreciate what she’s done here,” Cook said.
Louisville fans like Busboom Kelly based on the reception she and the Cardinals received on Thursday.
“I think the last time I was on the mic talking about Dani, I called her a badass,” Louisville middle blocker Phekran Kong said Friday at the press conference to preview the championship. “So I’m going to double that. Because she’s legit.’
In the fourth set on Thursday, after DeBeer left with the injury that could keep the senior All-American out of the championship match, middle blocker Cara Cresse Busboom Kelly promised she would deliver two blocks.
Cresse produced. The momentum shifted. The Panthers fell apart late in the game. Even second-year opponent Olivia Babcock, crowned national player of the year on Friday, felt the pressure. The cardinals embraced it.
“This is for all the people who doubted us,” said Louisville outside hitter Charitie Luper.
Her coach looked on and smiled.
In addition to breaking a glass ceiling Sunday, Busbom Kelly said, she is also excited that a woman will coach her team to the national championship so that athletic directors and future players who may go into coaching understand that it is possible.
“It’s more just being really proud that we can be role models,” she said, “and hopefully break new ground.”
(Top photo of Schumacher-Cawley: Dan Rainville/USA Today via Imagn Images