A long time coming for pro volleyball leagues

While the PVF opened its second season Jan. 9, the other league is in its inaugural year — League One Volleyball’s LOVB Pro league, a six-team league that also opened earlier this month, with the closest team to us being LOVB Salt Lake.

For years, I’ve been mystified as to why there were no professional volleyball leagues in the U.S. With the modern emphasis on women’s sports across the nation, all the hype surrounding basketball and soccer, quite frankly, makes me scratch my head. To each their own, of course, but for me, men’s basketball and men’s soccer makes for a better spectator sport than the respective women’s games. When it comes to volleyball, though, the women’s game is far superior, and always has been. And from where I’m sitting, the comparison isn’t even close.

I started covering high school volleyball in 2013 when Woodside great Christine Alftin was leading the Wildcats to the Peninsula Athletic League Bay Division championship, and Menlo School’s dynamic libero Mel Cairo was anchoring a CIF Northern California Division IV regional championship run for the Lady Knights. Since then, my mission in life shifted from my lifelong affinity for baseball to wanting to be the best volleyball writer on the planet.

How am I doing so far, volleyball world? You tell me.

I address my question to the volleyball world, because those who play and coach volleyball seem to be the only ones who pay attention to the sport. At least in the Bay Area, where the Giants, Niners and Dubs will always rule the sports landscape. Of course, collegiate volleyball proved it could put butts in the seats a couple years back when on Aug. 30, 2023, University of Nebraska-Lincoln and University of Nebraska-Omaha played at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Nebraska to a record crowd of 92,003.

Meanwhile, the Stanford Cardinal — the New York Yankees of NCAA volleyball with a Division I record nine all-time national championships — can’t even fill the 7,233 capacity of Maples Pavilion.

My love of volleyball was born, ironically, from the men’s game. In 1984, I tuned in faithfully to watch the U.S. Olympic volleyball team — anchored by team captain Chris Marlowe, now-volleyball announcer extraordinaire Paul Sunderland, and a 23-year-old wunderkind by the name of Karch Kiraly — capture the gold medal at the Los Angeles Games. I was instantly drawn in by the most basic understanding of the game, what I like to call the hot-potato effect. Even if you don’t know a thing about the ever-so complex rules of volleyball, you can enjoy it on the primal level of the rudimentary instinct to keep the ball up.

Then came my senior year of high school, when I gave seventh-period advanced P.E. a masterclass in volleyball general managing. I was one of six team captains chosen to pick volleyball teams for a monthlong winter league, played three days a week, in the auxiliary gymnasium of El Camino High School. It’s the same gym where my former schoolmate and longtime legendary Elco physical education teacher Eric Jacobson still teaches the class with the simple mantra: “You gotta win by 2!”

All six of the team captains were boys. And, if memory serves, I was the only one who wouldn’t have qualified as a “jock,” with the other five all excelling in one varsity sport or another. The rules for picking teams, as was the case with every sport in our P.E. class that year, stated every team had to have at least one girl on it. So, as was tradition, we were to each pick a girl in the first round, then pick freely between the boys and girls in our class for the remainder of the rounds.

So, after I picked Renee Cassidy late in the first round, I waited through the second round while all the other captains picked from the usual suspects of their guy friends. When my second pick came around, I took Rachele Trevisan. The third round played out the same, and the fourth, until the other team captains finally caught on to my draft strategy. We had most of the El Camino varsity volleyball team in our class, and I was the only one that seemed to have the scouting report.

That team of five lady aces and myself went undefeated over the next month. In doing so, I learned one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned in all my years of sports. And since I’ve been writing for the Daily Journal, I’ve employed that lesson — there’s a treasure trove of talent in the volleyball world and, in the boys’ locker room at least, I’m the only one who seems to know it.

After spending over a decade covering local volleyball, I now wonder why I’m still the only one who seems to know it.

Here at the Daily Journal, we check the Associated Press wire regularly, and depend on it to make our sports section every day. As I type the keyword “volleyball” into the search field today, it’s a shame that since the Dec. 23 game story from Penn State’s NCAA national championship victory over Louisville, there are only two volleyball stories published in the weeks since.

Both are less volleyball stories than they are political stories about transgender athletes. Not to turn this into a futile partisan debate, but if the only thing you know about volleyball is the transgender debate, then you probably don’t belong in the discussion. This is what I refer to as the Brittney Griner effect, as when Griner was imprisoned in Russia for over nine months, interest in women’s basketball skyrocketed. I wish the transgender issue (once again, I’m not trying to make a point about the debate) had the same effect of garnering interest in the actual sport of volleyball. Sadly, it hasn’t.

Hopefully, these two new pro volleyball leagues will. I’ll certainly be tuning in, especially since most of the PVF games are currently available for free viewing on YouTube.

A quick shoutout to the Atlanta volleyball scene, where two of my all-time favorites are playing. Setter Madi Bugg, a former Stanford star and collegiate contemporary of Steve Kerr’s daughter, Cal alum Maddy Kerr, is on roster with LOVB Atlanta. And in the PVF, my absolute bestest fave, libero Morgan Hentz, who won three national championships at Stanford, is on roster with the Atlanta Vibe.