Jason Joyce
Wisconsin volleyball game at the Field House.
Recent improvements made to the Field House have made it the 'perfect' venue for the sport, says UW coach Kelly Sheffield.
On Nov. 8, 2013, the University of Wisconsin volleyball team, ranked 16th in the country at the time, hosted arch-rival Nebraska at the UW Field House. The Cornhuskers, ranked 11th, won in four sets. The attendance was announced at 5,307, close to the building’s capacity when the upper deck remained closed to fans for safety reasons.
Just more than 10 years later, at 3 p.m. on Friday afternoon (the game will be televised on the Big Ten Network), the same matchup will take place in the same venue. The Field House capacity is now 7,540 and every seat has been claimed for months. As of Wednesday afternoon, the cheapest ticket available on the secondary market was a single seat in the corner, priced at $54. Some sellers were looking for more than $250.
All of that makes at least part of an email we received at Isthmus from a fan a few weeks ago pretty reasonable:
Why does UW Athletics keep top ranked Women’s Volleyball in a small venue? It’s been sold out for years. Demand is high. Nebraska plays in their largest arena and sells out. We could too.
Is UW Athletics SEXIST? Are they holding Women’s Volleyball back by keeping play in the field house? Are they keeping women’s sports right where they want women? Smaller and less important?
“I love the question, I have to say,” says Katie Ahrens Smith, senior associate athletic director at UW, “because it shows the interest in volleyball and specifically in Badger volleyball.”
As part of her duties, Ahrens Smith oversees the volleyball program, which won a national title in 2021. As the Badgers climbed from being a solid Big Ten program to one of the country’s best over the last 10 years, word started getting out about how fun the Field House atmosphere was. Fans accustomed to walking up and buying tickets at the box office had to start planning ahead. Those hoping to secure season tickets had to start donating to the athletic department to qualify, just like football and men’s basketball fans.
And general admission ticket holders started queueing up outside the Field House hours before matches.
A move to the much larger Kohl Center (basketball capacity: 17,287) seems like a good idea. But Ahrens Smith says that’s not necessarily the case.
“The Field House is volleyball’s domain,” she says. “They’ve been playing there since 1986. It’s one of the few facilities in the country that’s dedicated to volleyball.”
The UW spent $1.5 million in 2015 to renovate the Field House, including locker rooms, study space, a lounge and training room. A $77.6 million project five years later that overhauled the south end of Camp Randall Stadium also included improvements to the Field House’s exterior, brightening up the stone and replacing the windows of the gym that opened in 1930.
“It’s ideal for our volleyball program to have a facility dedicated to them versus, say, another facility that’s the home of four other sports or that’s really built more for basketball and for hockey,” Ahrens Smith says.
Perhaps more important, she points out that the team and its coach, Kelly Sheffield, love the Field House. In September 2022, when Wisconsin hosted Florida in a match at the Kohl Center, Sheffield was initially opposed, saying the Field House was “perfect for our sport.”
“It's not easy when you want your program to be as successful as possible and it’s ‘Hey, Kelly, we're going to go play Florida over at the Kohl Center where you don't practice and we're going to have to put a temporary court in and temporary nets,” Ahrens Smith says.
Sheffield eventually agreed to the game, but the Badgers lost to the Gators, 3-2, in front of 16,883 fans.
The atmosphere in an old gym with 7,000 fans located close to the court feels much more electric than even 12,000 fans sitting farther away from the action in a larger space. Disclaimer: I grew up attending college basketball games at Williams Arena in Minneapolis and watched the Badger men’s basketball team in the Field House when I was in school, so I’m biased in favor of old arenas.
Of course, moving into the much larger Kohl Center wouldn’t come with just the added logistics of negotiating space with the men’s and women’s basketball teams and men’s hockey team, it would mean adding expenses in the form of staffing the larger venue.
Still, how will the university know the real potential of volleyball to become a revenue-producing sport if it doesn’t take a big step?
Ahrens Smith points out that the athletic department is committed to giving student athletes a first-class experience and making sure that those participating in the traditional non-revenue sports like volleyball are treated as well as football players.
“We charter [a plane] to most away matches,” she says. “Not all, and maybe there’s one we might choose to fly there and bus back, but that’s a conversation whether you’re football, basketball, hockey or volleyball.”
2023 has been a remarkable year for college volleyball attendance. Aug. 30 was “Volleyball Day in Nebraska” and the Cornhuskers beat Omaha in front of over 92,000 fans in the school’s football stadium. Two weeks later, the Badgers beat Marquette in front of 17,000 fans at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee.
But the biggest history-making stat of the season so far is 1.66 million. That’s the number of television viewers who on Oct. 29 watched Wisconsin vs. Minnesota or Ohio State vs. Michigan on Fox. Broadcast immediately following the Green Bay Packers vs. Minnesota Vikings game, the Wisconsin match was served to 76% of the country and has been called the most-watched college volleyball match, surpassing the previous record set just a week earlier when over 600,000 tuned in to watch Wisconsin, ranked number one in the country at the time, lose to second-ranked Nebraska in Lincoln.
So even if the size of the arenas doesn’t grow for a while, the TV audience continues to get the attention of network executives. The Big Ten Network will air 55 matches this season, the most in history. The sport is a fixture in the network’s Wednesday night prime time slot and follows the late football game on Saturday. Indeed, the Oct. 21 Wisconsin match at Nebraska drew a bigger TV audience than the football game leading into it.
And as ESPN takes over programming during the NCAA tournament next week, there’s a good chance we’ll see audience numbers in seven figures again.
