Nebraska volleyball's Harper Murray trying to regain trust, recapture love
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Elizabeth Merrill, ESPN Senior Writer
HARPER MURRAY DIDN’T want people to see her cry, so she escaped to the bathroom. She stood in front of a mirror and un-puffed her eyes. She wanted to kick a wall. Her No. 1 Nebraska volleyball team had just lost the national championship to Texas in straight sets, and now she was being summoned to a postgame news conference to deconstruct the whole debacle.
Two Nebraska staffers walked in and tried to coax her to the dais.
“If I go in there,” she told them, “it’s not going to go well.”
Murray always considered herself a social person, but not on a night when she played, in her opinion, one of the worst matches of her life. She had nothing to say.
They assured her that her teammates would be there and that she didn’t have to answer any questions she didn’t want to, so she trudged to the front. And she was doing fine. Murray sat there blank-faced and mostly silent for 8½ minutes, fidgeting with her ear piercings, and then someone asked her about next year and she could contain herself no more.
“I think we’re going to win three national championships the next three years,” she said.
Murray’s teammate Rebekah Allick, seated two chairs over, loved it. “F— yeah,” she said on a hot mic. Murray’s mom, Sarah, heard about it on the walk from the arena to her hotel and was equally pumped: “There’s my girl!”
But it did not go over as well on social media. The next morning on the team’s flight back to Lincoln, Murray scrolled through her phone and read the trolls. They told her she should learn how to pass before she talked smack. Some of them said her late father would be disappointed in her. Others told her to kill herself.
“A lot of those comments on social media hurt so badly,” she said. “But why is that affecting me so much to the point where I hate volleyball, I hate myself, I hate everything around me, and I can’t find anything positive that’s going on in my life at all?”
She had no idea how much that match, and the backlash from those 13 words, would stalk her over the next six months.
She skipped class, got arrested for DUI, was caught shoplifting and was so despondent that at one point her family worried that she’d take her own life. She went to a psychiatric emergency room.
When a doctor there asked her how this downward spiral started, Murray recalled that December night in Tampa, Florida. She told him of the postgame prediction heard throughout the volleyball world. He had a hard time processing that she was attacked for saying something so benign, so he asked her to repeat what she said to those reporters again. He sat back in his chair.
“That,” he said, “triggered that response?”
IT MIGHT SEEM strange to say now, but from the moment Nebraska came into her life, Murray yearned for what the program embodies. Being a standout Nebraska volleyball player commands statewide celebrity. It means little girls in towns smaller than your high school graduating class will swat volleyballs in their backyard, pretending that they’re you.
It means playing in packed houses with crowds savvy enough to know if you’re out of system, if you’ve messed up, because a number of those 8,300 people in the stands have been season-ticket holders for decades. You’ll go on the road and half of the people in the stands will wear red, some of them traveling hundreds of miles to see their team in person because it’s the only way they can. You’ll expect to play in front of sold-out home crowds, because it’s been that way since 2001 and there’s a waiting list for season tickets.
Nebraska volleyball is so self-assured of its place in the state that it held an outdoor match in the football stadium last year. On Aug. 30, 2023 — the fourth contest of Murray’s college career — the Cornhuskers packed 92,003 people into Memorial Stadium, an attendance record for a women’s sporting event.
Murray joked with her boyfriend, who plays on the NU football team, that her team drew a bigger crowd than his. Never mind that what allowed the women to surpass the football team’s largest crowd of 91,585, for a Miami game in 2014, was that part of the field was open for volleyball fans.
Murray was so captivated by “Volleyball Day in Nebraska” that she put nine photos of the event on Instagram. Her post received 19,000 likes.
By virtue of all the attention that match received, the 2023 expectations naturally ratcheted up for Murray. She was the No. 1 recruit in the class of 2023 and could have gone anywhere, but she knew it was always Nebraska. She embraced those expectations. The summer before eighth grade, she attended Nebraska’s Dream Team Camp and clicked with the girls who would later become her teammates, but it was more than that. She wanted to be Jordan Larson, the Husker from small-town Nebraska who became an Olympic gold medalist in 2021. She wanted to be better than Larson.
Murray had to leave camp early that year; her family had commitments back home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. But she didn’t want to leave Lincoln. As Nebraska faded from her airplane window, Murray sobbed.
“Mom,” she said, “I love it here.”
A few years later, Murray, who had grown to 6-foot-2 and was annihilating volleyballs throughout Michigan, narrowed her choices to Wisconsin, Texas and Nebraska. One of the coaches recruiting her asked why she didn’t celebrate and show emotion on the court. She told him that she was afraid of being judged, of being labeled too confident or cocky.
“Can I give you some advice, Harper?” the coach asked. “Let it rip.”
MURRAY DOESN’T REMEMBER a lot about her dad, but she is told that she’s a lot like him.
Vada Murray was a Michigan free safety from 1988 to 1990 and played under coach Bo Schembechler. Murray exuded confidence and athleticism and hated to lose in anything. Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel keeps a photo in his office of Vada Murray soaring into the sky with Tripp Welborne on their way to blocking a field goal.
When Manuel first watched Harper play volleyball, he was struck by how much she moved like her father — the jumping, the glides, the raw energy she put into every point.
Manuel was Vada’s teammate, roommate and best friend. He said Vada wasn’t one to express a lot of emotion, but when Manuel suffered a career-ending neck injury, his roommate vowed to play that season for him, and told him that he loved him and that everything was going to be alright.
Decades later, when Vada was dying, he asked Manuel to look out for his children. Harper, Kendall and Deric still call him Uncle Warde.
Manuel tells them stories about their dad. Manuel said that Vada was so good that he was invited to the NFL combine out of college, but he turned it down to be a police officer. He wanted to serve Ann Arbor, the community he had grown to love.
Vada was the first person in his family to graduate from college. He was part of the fabric of Ann Arbor, as a football hero and as a cop, but he was — and Sarah hesitates to use this word because of its dual meaning — simple.
“I mean that in the most complimentary way possible,” she said. “He didn’t need very much to be happy. We liked to work out together. That was a big thing for our family. He loved seafood and grilling steaks. He loved Michigan football. He knew a lot of people, and he had a handful of close friends.
“And he wanted to lead. He was amiable. He was soft. … He could look like this menacing guy in a police officer’s uniform, but he was actually just really soft and easygoing.”
Vada was so beloved in Ann Arbor that when Sarah gave birth to their daughters, the nurses posed for photos with him. He would go to Dick’s Sporting Goods with his partner, Craig Martin, and buy basketballs for underprivileged children in their community. Years removed from football, he remained dedicated and relentless. In his first year on the job, Sarah said, he ran through a pothole in a backyard during a drug raid in the middle of the night and tore his ACL.
In 2008, Vada noticed that he couldn’t draw a deep breath when he was running. He had just turned 41, and Sarah joked that he was slowing down, but then Vada noticed a protruding pouch underneath his rib cage. He went to the doctor, who told him to go to the ER, and there he was told he needed surgery. They tried to stay hopeful.
He went into the hospital on a Tuesday. Sarah found out while he was still under anesthesia: Stage 3B lung cancer, one step below end-stage. When he woke up and saw her face, she didn’t need to tell him anything. He knew he had cancer.
After the doctors told him the news, and Sarah finished taking notes, she looked around the room for a bedpan. She thought she was going to be sick.
She spent the night at the hospital, and Chris Wooley, an Ann Arbor cop who was one of Vada’s best friends, picked her up early the next morning and took her home. Wooley was talking to his wife on the phone about schedules and kid duties that day, and it was a conversation similar to hundreds she’d had with Vada. And in the familiar normalcy of that, it hit her: Their lives would never be the same.
But she had to keep moving. They had to. Vada endured chemotherapy and drug trials and saw glimmers of hope with shrinking tumors. But by early 2011, the cancer had spread to his brain and his options evaporated.
Sarah and Vada met with two therapists to discuss how to tell Harper, Kendall and Deric that he was going to die. The therapists recommended bringing the children to their office. Vada was nearly bedridden by then, and it took three people to get him into the car. He told his children that he was going to die because he had cancer, and that it wasn’t their fault.
Deric and Kendall were quiet. Harper, who had just turned 6, moved around the room, touching everything with her blanket. She walked over to her dad, got in between his legs and looked at him. She asked if he was going to die because she had just gotten in trouble in school.
“That’s not why I’m going to die, Harper,” he told her.
Sarah looked into the children’s eyes, for cues and reactions, trying to stay composed.
“I felt like my whole body was on fire,” she said.
IN HIS TWO years as Harper Murray’s teacher at Wines Elementary School, Neil Duggins often told her to slow down and pump the brakes. “I’m old,” he would say, “and I drive in the right-hand lane.”
Murray was diagnosed with ADHD as a child and had so much energy that she could be distracting in their small portable classroom. So Duggins gave her what he called “brain breaks,” including trips to the office and occasionally tasking her with sweeping the floor.
“The best way to describe it,” Duggins said, “was that there were times when her body and her mouth got ahead of her brain a little bit. She needed to rewind, calm down and think for a second.”
He believes that Murray’s time with him, in the fourth and fifth grades, was when she came into her own. She loved being social and hung out with the boys and with the girls. Duggins knows it seems corny, but Murray always seemed to be in a good mood.
Sarah sent her to therapy to treat anxiety in the years after her father died. She noticed how much the little girl talked about, and feared, death.
Murray constantly checked in with her mom, making sure she was OK. If she didn’t reach her right away, Murray panicked. She had nightmares about family members dying.
Murray was so young when her dad died that some of her memories aren’t her own, Sarah said. Murray has a recollection of pulling on her father’s pant leg and crying the day he told them he was dying, and in that memory, she’s telling him not to leave. But that never happened. Sarah said it’s a recollection of two years of her dad dropping her off at daycare.
When Murray graduated from high school a semester early to go to Nebraska, of course Sarah worried about her. She was 17 years old and took her “Lovey” — a comfort blanket that her grandmother made — with her to Lincoln.
But on the court, Murray looked as if she belonged. She became one of the main attackers on a Cornhuskers team that won its first 27 matches, 16 in sweeps. She hammered 12 kills and had four blocks and three aces in a four-game victory over powerhouse Stanford in September, and she had 14 kills in an October win against No. 1 Wisconsin.
The Badgers beat Nebraska in a rematch in Madison a month later, but otherwise, everything seemed to go right for Murray and a Cornhuskers team loaded with freshmen and no seniors. Murray was named a third-team All-American and Big Ten freshman of the year. She put together what she thought was her best collegiate performance in the national semifinals with 13 kills in a sweep of Pittsburgh.
“That’s my favorite game to watch,” Murray said. “I’ve rewatched it so many times. Like, I could probably tell you every single point in order.”
The Texas match is a different story. She knows it’s important to learn from her mistakes, but it brings back a deluge of bad passes and memories.
“I think the hardest part was seeing them celebrate in the corner of my eye,” she said. “I refused to look that way because I didn’t want to see it.
“I was just straight furious, and seeing all red.”
LEXI RODRIGUEZ IS EVERYTHING you’d want in a libero and captain — steady and calm when chaos is flying at her left and right. While her younger teammates were reeling on that dais that night in December, Rodriguez was almost surgical. She thoughtfully answered all her questions, got up, turned back for her bottle of water and exited.
On the charter flight home, when Murray was reading the social media comments and sobbing a few rows away, Rodriguez grabbed her and they moved to the front of the plane to talk. Murray told her how upset she was about the hate posts, and Rodriguez’s response was simple: Stop reading them. But Murray couldn’t.
When the plane landed in Lincoln after the national championship match, Nebraska fans waited for the team at the airport. Murray didn’t understand why they were there. They had lost. She was embarrassed by her performance, and the negative comments.
Murray put a blanket over her head and stared at the ground.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, of course they’re at the airport,'” Murray said. “And it’s so sweet, but I was like, ‘F—. Why are they here? I’m humiliated. I don’t want to see the fans. I don’t want to be looked at. I just want to go home.'”
A teammate asked her if she saw a sign someone was holding up, and Murray said no. It said, “We love you, Harper.”
She couldn’t see the positive anywhere. She was actively scrolling, searching her name to find all the negative posts. Coach John Cook, for his part, loved Murray’s prediction. “If Steph Curry said that, everybody would applaud it,” Cook said.
“Sometimes when women say it, I think it comes across differently or is cocky or whatever. But that’s her belief system. … I’d rather have somebody who’s [saying that than] just accepting it.”
Cook called her and texted her and told her how much he loved what she said, but none of it resonated. He asked Rodriguez to check on Murray later that day. She lived next door. Murray’s shades were drawn and the TV was on, but she was fixated on her phone. Rodriguez stayed by her side for about an hour. Murray didn’t leave her room the rest of the day.
“In a way, I wanted myself to feel bad,” Murray said, “because I was so disappointed in myself.”
She was going home to Ann Arbor the next day for winter break. Cook hoped that would help Murray get her mind off the national championship and her detractors.
He also hoped that she would get off social media, but he knew better. He calls it “addictive,” and at 68, he can’t completely grasp its pull. He ropes cattle for a hobby and goes on Instagram mainly to look at “horse stuff.”
Cook checked in with his players about a week later, shortly after Christmas, and found that many of them were still struggling over how a dominating season ended with such a thud. Murray wasn’t the only one who couldn’t seem to get out of bed, he said. Others were just as upset.
“When you compete at a high level and you’re playing for it all on the biggest stage in college volleyball,” Cook said, “it should hurt if you don’t play your best.”
A MONTH AWAY from Lincoln helped, but Murray dreaded going back to school for the spring semester. She said she “bawled her eyes out” the whole plane ride to Lincoln.
“We started [the] beach [season],” Murray said, “and that’s when I started to realize how much I hated volleyball. So many of the negative comments made me hate myself. And volleyball has been my identity for so long that hating myself and hating volleyball went hand in hand.”
In February, Edward Murray Jr. — Harper’s grandfather and Vada’s dad — died, and Murray went to Cincinnati for his funeral. She was at a T.J. Maxx when she noticed two adults following her. It appeared as if they were taking video of her, and her anxiety spiked. Murray’s mom walked over to them, and the strangers quickly apologized. They said that their daughter loves Murray, was a huge fan and asked if they could take a picture.
Murray exhaled.
That first year in Lincoln, she had come to realize that people would stop her in grocery stores or on the street for an autograph, a photo or just to say hello. Maybe it was awkward sometimes if she was in a hurry or just wanted to be alone, but Murray was an extrovert and she liked that people cared so much about volleyball, about her, to stop.
Now she was on edge. A team doctor prescribed her Sertraline, which is the generic form of Zoloft. She was told it would take a few weeks to build up in her system. But weeks passed, and Murray felt worse. She said she didn’t take every dose; when the beach team went to Hawaii in March, she said she was off track with the time change.
The change of scenery from the brown expanse of Nebraska to the blue waters of Hawaii seemed to do wonders for Murray. At least that’s what her social media dispatches showed. From Honolulu, she posted smiling photos with her teammates. “In our happy place …” it said. But at night, she cried so hard that her face swelled and her head hurt and she couldn’t sleep. She lost about 10 pounds on her already lean, 6-2 frame.
One night in Hilo, she sat in the hallway of the hotel crying. Various teammates — some of them her closest friends — came out to try to talk with her, and asked her what was wrong. She didn’t know what to say. Every time she picked up a volleyball, she wanted to walk off the court. She was embarrassed when people watched her play.
“I don’t even know what I told them at that point,” Murray said. “It was just so bad. Then I called my mom at like probably 2, 3 a.m., and she’s worried s—less because I’m calling her while I’m in Hawaii, telling her that I don’t want to be here, and I hate myself, and I don’t know why.”
PEOPLE TELL KENDALL MURRAY she’s the spitting image of her father. Their faces are almost cut-and-pasted: the high cheekbones, the chin dimple, the easy smile. In Ann Arbor, people will stop her, incredulous over how much she looks like her dad.
She is three years older than Harper and a standout volleyball player in her own right, but there is one noticeable difference. Nothing seems to get to Kendall.
She used to dream of going away for school and took recruiting trips to Florida, Pittsburgh and Maryland. But she kept thinking about her single parent mom having to fly far away to see her play, and the things she’d miss out on. “We had just gotten a puppy,” Kendall said. “And I still wanted to be a part of their lives, specifically Harper’s.”
So Kendall became a Michigan athlete like her dad. She chose jersey No. 27, the same number he wore. (Harper eventually picked No. 27 at Nebraska too.) After the sisters played against each other in November — a three-game victory for the Cornhuskers — a postgame video of them posing together received 132,000 likes on Instagram.
Months later, Harper took a photo of herself in tears and Snapchatted it to Kendall. Harper made desperate calls to her from Hawaii, and suddenly, the big sister who is the embodiment of chill, became scared.
Kendall’s mind drifted to Katie Meyer, a Stanford soccer captain who died by suicide in 2022. Kendall thought of her friend Miles. They’d been friends from kindergarten to Skyline High School, and then one day, Miles jumped off a bridge and died. He was 15. Every time Kendall drives by the bridge, she’s reminded of it.
So as her sister sounded more and more desperate in those late-night calls, Kendall said she worried that Harper would end her own life.
“The next thing,” Kendall told Sarah, “is we’re going to be sitting here, and instead of being like, ‘What’s going to happen next?’ it’s going to be too late. She’s going to snap. Because she’s snapped so much.'”
On April 3, USA Volleyball announced that Murray had been selected to the U.S. Under-21 Women’s National Team. Two days later, she made the local news again. “Husker Player Cited for DUI,” said the graphic on Omaha’s ABC affiliate.
Murray, according to Lincoln police records, was driving her 2024 Audi SUV when she was pulled over in the early morning hours of April 5 after breaking multiple traffic laws. She did not comply with multiple officer directives, police said. She had a blood alcohol content of 0.169, more than twice Nebraska’s legal limit.
From jail, Murray made two calls — to her boyfriend and to Merritt Beason, then a junior captain on the volleyball team. Beason is known as the mom on the team, and Murray knew she would come and pick her up without asking any questions.
Murray said she was at a fraternity party that night. She didn’t hang out with her teammates; volleyball was what she was trying to escape. She said she was five minutes away from home and didn’t want to leave her car at the party because she had practice the next morning. She couldn’t call any of her teammates for a ride, she said, because then they would know she was out drinking.
It was just before the anniversary of her dad’s death, and she said she was thinking about it.
“I don’t want to use that as an excuse,” she said. “But I think that week is always a very hard week for me, no matter what. It might not be on my mind all the time, but in the back of my head, I know it.”
Murray was so embarrassed that she didn’t go to the training table, where athletes eat. This, she thought, was the lowest she could get. The national championship loss suddenly seemed smaller. Now she had something to be even more ashamed of.
Three of Murray’s teammates sat on her bed and kept her company until her mom arrived from Michigan. One of them took Murray’s phone and deleted her Instagram and TikTok apps.
“I definitely didn’t want that,” Murray said, “but we all knew that it had to happen.”
Sarah Murray considered pulling her daughter out of school, but ultimately believed Murray was getting the help she needed. She was taking her Sertraline and meeting with a therapist in Lincoln and an NU sports psychologist. Her semester would be over in a few weeks, then she’d come home in May and they could reassess how she was doing.
Whenever Sarah saw her daughter interacting with her teammates, things seemed OK.
A few weeks later, Kendall was getting ready for graduation at Michigan, and her sister’s Nebraska volleyball team was boarding a bus to head two hours on Interstate 80 west to Kearney, Nebraska, for their annual spring game. Murray was suspended for the match because of the DUI but was traveling with the team. The bus was just about to roll out of Lincoln when Murray received a text from her boyfriend.
“Harper,” Murray recalls the text saying, “are you joking? You stole?”
ONE DAY EARLIER, on May 2, Murray went to Scheels sporting goods store in Lincoln and purchased a black parka and a sweatshirt. She also shoplifted five gold-colored rings, priced at $12.99 apiece.
Murray remembers walking up to the rings and taking them, but then, she said, she blacked out. The next thing she recalls is driving away, and not feeling remorseful.
“I did not give one single crap,” she said.
The following afternoon, Murray was in full panic mode. She knew it was only a matter of time before word got out, and there she was, trapped on a bus with her coaches and teammates. Her boyfriend had found out about the incident from a friend who worked at Scheels, she said.
Murray called her lawyer, who told her to call her mother. But she didn’t want to do that. She called her sports psychologist at Nebraska, who put Sarah on a three-way call. The sports psychologist told Murray to find Marquita Armstead, who at the time was NU’s executive associate athletic director and senior woman administrator. Armstead was sitting at the front of the bus.
Murray told her that she was being accused of shoplifting at Scheels.
“Did you do it?” Armstead asked.
Murray broke down crying.
“Yes,” she said.
Sarah was out walking their dog Iggy when her weekend was upended that Friday. She asked her daughter why she did it, and Murray said she didn’t know.
When the team got off the bus in Kearney, Murray told Lindsay Peterson, NU’s director of volleyball operations. The Cornhuskers headed to a workout that would include about 150 high school coaches in the stands. Murray practiced, waiting for the moment one of those coaches checked his or her phone and saw the headlines: Harper Murray Busted. Then everyone in the gym would be staring at her, judging her again. But nothing leaked.
Peterson spoke with Sarah and promised her that Murray would not be left alone, and they made a collective decision to confiscate her phone and laptop. They wanted to shield her from the internet trolls, who were about to have plenty more fodder.
The team had a banquet that night, and it was attended by at least 100 fans in Kearney. Murray was sequestered in a hotel room with Armstead, and they ate lasagna and watched “Dateline.”
The Cornhuskers were seated at their event when one of the players saw the news of the shoplifting incident on her phone, and word spread quickly among them. They proceeded to sign autographs.
Back in Ann Arbor, Kendall walked into the house and heard her mom talking on the phone in her room. She could tell by the tone of her voice that something was wrong. Sarah didn’t want to tell her that her sister had shoplifted, because Kendall was about to go to graduation and it was supposed to be her weekend.
They went downstairs in the kitchen — Kendall’s grandma was there — and they made dinner and cried.
The next day, while Nebraska soundly defeated Denver in front of a sold-out crowd of more than 5,000, Murray watched on a TV in a back room. She could not get home to Ann Arbor until the next day, so that night, Peterson took her to her family acreage outside of Lincoln. There, she had a “sleepover” with Peterson’s four sons, ages 4 to 11.
“My boys adore her,” Peterson told Sarah. “I think she needs some genuine love with people who are innocent and aren’t going to have any judgement.”
Peterson said Murray curled up on the downstairs couch with the boys and watched a movie.
“It was as pure as little kids can be,” Peterson said.
ON THE LAST PAGE of her psychiatric evaluation from May 5, Murray is described as a 19-year-old woman with ADHD, depression and anxiety who showed up in the ER because of her “recent involvement in reckless behaviors that are atypical for her.” It said that though she had no clear manic symptoms, after taking Sertraline, “it appears her mood worsened and became less stable afterwards.”
Murray was weaned off Sertraline and prescribed a different medication. She entered an outpatient therapy program in Ann Arbor two days after her trip to the psychiatric ER. On May 20, she posted an apology on her Instagram story. “I deeply regret some of the recent decisions I’ve made, and the pain that I have caused my family, my team, volleyball fans, and everyone who has supported me,” she wrote. “I take full responsibility for my actions.”
In June, Murray entered a pretrial diversion program for her shoplifting charge. A month later, she reached a plea deal on her DUI charge and was sentenced to nine months’ probation. She was ordered to pay a $500 fine and had her driver’s license revoked for 60 days.
Murray wonders if she had to hit rock bottom to come to terms with what was going on in her brain.
“I’m not grateful it happened at all,” Murray said of the shoplifting. “But part of me is, because then I wouldn’t have figured everything out.”
She still sees a therapist, a sports psychologist and a psychiatrist in Lincoln. She attended a therapy workshop in Utah that she called “genuinely the best five days of my life.”
She had to give up her phone when she arrived and was the only participant under the age of 50. Murray heard the stories of women who were having problems with their children, or experiencing their own trauma. It made her think about what her mom has endured.
They did puzzles, walked to an ice cream shop and experienced nature, and it was peaceful being disconnected. Most of all, they talked. Murray went on runs and wrote in her journal, and now, her retreat buddies have a group chat. Sometimes, Murray will finish a puzzle, take a picture of it and send it to them.
“I think a lot of them are going to come to my games this year because we play at Ohio State,” she said. “One of them is from Columbus, and we play at Washington and Oregon, and a lot of them are from there. So I think I’m going to get to see them again.
“My teammates are going to be like, ‘Who are these random people in Washington?'”
ON ONE OF HER last days of summer, Murray was back home, eating lunch with her family at a deli in Ann Arbor when she scrolled to a reply on her Instagram.
It came from an avatar with a rudimentary sketch. Murray had just written something about her dad on his birthday, and posted a photo of Vada Murray holding her.
“Go Blue,” the person typed, “you’re from Ann Arbor, but betrayed your dad, your family, your friends, your community, your state, for Nebraska? Wow.
“As I read every post, lol. Looks like you have the miserable life you deserve. Karma crapped right in your mouth.”
Kendall called it almost laughable.
“You would think it would hurt more because it’s such a terrible thing,” Kendall said. “But you know you’re not right, you’re not good in the head to be saying something like that to somebody.”
Kendall said she noticed that social media became nastier during the pandemic.
People were stuck in their homes and had nothing to do, she said, so they took to their phones. Kendall said it also gave the people who hate more time and energy “to just hate.”
College athletes are perfect targets for social media users who project their own insecurities and anger on others, said Timothy Neal, a licensed social worker and member of the National Athletic Trainers’ Association Hall of Fame.
Athletes, and young people in general, he said, have underdeveloped brains that are at risk for mental health challenges and disorders.
“You see athletes being bullied or questioned or second-guessed all the time,” Neal said, “either by their performance, or they’re not that good, or how they look. They could cost you money in a gambling thing.
“The athlete is really not that much different than the normal walk of life, but they have more unique stressors on them than the general public. And then now they have participation things that are out there from an athlete standpoint that could be nitpicked and criticized and people that can do it anonymously through social media.”
Murray used to dream of being a TikTok star when she was a kid. She likes the feeling when she opens the apps and sees that someone has edited a clip of her and her teammates, put it to music and made it look “super cool.” She had 10,000 Instagram followers in high school, and her friends thought it was awesome when one of her posts would get 1,000 likes. At Nebraska, her followers ballooned to 90,000.
“The videos are so heartwarming sometimes,” she said, “so I like that. I enjoy sharing my life on social media. I think there is such a judgmental stigma around posting too much.
“Maybe that is unhealthy, but I think social media can be such a fun place if you let it.”
JOHN COOK FOUND himself in the middle of a mini social media firestorm earlier this summer when he announced, via a statement to the Lincoln Journal Star, that he wasn’t suspending Murray for any matches.
In 2011, when Cook’s daughter Lauren, the team’s setter, was arrested on suspicion of leaving the scene of an injury accident, Cook sat her for two matches.
In August, Cook told ESPN Murray was “good to go” for the season. He said she had gone “above and beyond anything and everything that was expected of her.”
“She was proactive on doing everything she needs to earn her rightful spot on the team,” he said.
Nebraska runs a series of youth camps over the summer, and players can select whether they want to work the morning or afternoon sessions, which run three hours apiece. Murray said she was required to do both each day. Cook declined to call it a penance for her actions, again referring to her community service work, the therapy and the retreat.
“We thought it would be great for Harper to be in all the camps,” he said. “It’s all about giving back. It’s not about yourself. It’s about giving back to some kid from Burwell, Nebraska, who shucks corn all summer to pay to come to camp. It’s about giving them a great experience, and that takes the focus off of you.”
Murray was initially apprehensive about doing the camps and being around all those people. She never played for the Under-21 National Team over the summer, not after everything that happened. She didn’t know how the girls, in seventh to 12th grade, would react to what she’d done and wondered if they’d hate her. Eventually, she decided she was going to turn it into something positive.
Murray also had to face her teammates. Peterson called the meeting a “big-girl conversation,” a chance for every player to express her feelings and discuss what they needed from her moving forward.
Murray sat with them for 90 minutes and tried to explain everything from Tampa to the psych ER in Michigan, and the progress she felt she had made.
“It was hard,” she said, “because they were very upset with me, as they should have been. And obviously, a lot of trust was broken. And I’ll be honest, it was really hard because after I said all of that, they all kind of took their turns, telling me how they felt, and obviously, it wasn’t nice stuff. And I didn’t expect it to be.
“I’m walking a very thin line with all of them, and I know that. It’s taken some time, and we’ve already made a lot of progress. … We all have the same goals and a lot of love and respect for each other. Even if that respect is broken sometimes, we figure out a way to get through it.”
Last week, Murray appeared at her first news conference since that night in Tampa. She was comfortable talking about things that did not involve herself, including Jordan Larson, who she watched play in the Olympics this summer.
Murray was asked how her teammates have supported her, and she turned to Beason.
“I think obviously we’ve done a really good job of helping Harper through all the stuff that she’s had to deal with,” Beason said. “But also that’s just the culture of Nebraska volleyball. So it’s not just been her. We just continue to build those relationships and ultimately grow the deeper understanding of each other so those relationships come out on the court.”
When Beason finished, Murray added a one-word reply.
“Period.”
On Tuesday, Murray and the Cornhuskers will start fresh, facing Kentucky in their season opener at the AVCA First Serve Showcase in Louisville. Many times since the national championship match, Murray contemplated quitting volleyball, getting as far away as she could from the place that takes it so seriously.
Ultimately, she couldn’t do that to her coaches and teammates who, in a simpler time in high school, talked about winning two national championships together — at least. She couldn’t do it to the little girls who looked up to her.
Murray said they’re the ones who are keeping her on social media now. On a recent summer afternoon, Murray grabbed her phone and glanced at something she’d posted from a camp she’d done recently at a YMCA in Hastings, Nebraska, population 25,000.
In a few of the photos, the girls aren’t looking at the camera. They’re looking at Murray, and she doesn’t mind one bit. She talked to them about boyfriends, clothes and volleyball, and the girls clung to every word.
And finally, Murray stopped to appreciate all the people who were for her instead of the few who were against her.
“I think part of my healing process is learning to love volleyball again,” Murray said. “And I think that will come when I learn how to love myself more too.”
ESPN’s Jennifer Karson-Strauss contributed to this story.
