NCAA Women
November 28, 2023
By Greg Echlin for VolleyballMag.com
There was hardly a better way to play your third match of the season than outdoors with 92,003 fans looking on — the highest attended women’s sports event in history — in late August inside the University of Nebraska’s Memorial Stadium.
Unless, that is, you were on the opposite end of the floor facing the Huskers.
The Omaha Mavericks, a first-time NCAA tournament entry three months later, did that day. They showed up, never led and got swept.
“It was loud. It’s a different kind of coaching environment and playing environment,” said Matt Buttermore, the Mavericks coach since April 2019.
What’s more, it was part of a nine-match, season-opening losing streak.
Talk about a turnaround: Omaha (15-13) tied with three other teams atop The Summit League. Then the Mavericks beat Denver in five in the conference semifinals before pulling off a remarkable reverse sweep of Kansas City in the final, 18-25, 20-25, 26-24, 25-12, 15-11.
Now they in their first NCAA tournament when they travel to Kansas (23-5), the 14th seed overall and fourth in the Wisconsin region. Kansas swept Omaha on August 26. The winner of the 7 p.m. Central Thursday match plays again Friday against the winner of the earlier Thursday match between Yale and Penn State.
Omaha lost in the previous two Summit finals to South Dakota.
“We’re going to prepare our best, play a really good team in Kansas and see if we can punch through a couple more walls,” said Buttermore, the successor to Rose Shires who retired after 29 seasons.
Omaha is one of three Nebraska schools in the NCAA Tournament along with the aforementioned top-seeded Huskers and the other team in Omaha, 12th-seeded Creighton.
As if that doesn’t say enough about the state of volleyball in Nebraska, try this: Two more schools — the University of Nebraska-Kearney and Wayne State College — are in the NCAA Division II tournament.
“It’s really amazing for such a small (population) state,”…
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