Penn St., Louisville to vie for NCAA volleyball title

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky — Penn State’s women’s volleyball team won an historic national semifinal match Thursday to set up even more history on Sunday: For the first time since the NCAA tournament began for the sport in 1981, a woman will win the title as head coach.

That’s guaranteed, as both teams in Sunday’s final (ABC, 3 p.m. ET) are coached by women. Penn State is led by Katie Schumacher-Cawley, while its opponent in the championship round, Louisville, is led by Dani Busboom Kelly. Both women won NCAA titles as players — Schumacher-Cawley with Penn State in 1999 and Busboom Kelly with Nebraska in 2006.

It looked as if Busboom Kelly, whose Cardinals won the first semifinal 3-1 over Pitt, would play her alma matter in the final, as Nebraska took a 2-0 lead over the Nittany Lions in Thursday’s second match.

But then Penn State staged an epic rally, becoming just the sixth team ever to get a reverse sweep — winning the last three sets after losing the first two — in the final four. The Nittany Lions are the only program to do that twice; they also got a reverse sweep to win the championship match over Texas in 2009.

Nebraska was the last team to do it, against Illinois in the 2018 semifinals. But Thursday, the stunned Huskers lost just their second NCAA tournament match in any round after winning the first two sets. They are now 104-2 in that situation.

The Penn State-Nebraska match finished after midnight, ending with the Nittany Lions winning the fifth set 15-13. Jess Mruzik led Penn State with 26 kills.

It’s been an emotional year for the Nittany Lions, with Schumacher-Cawley coaching despite being diagnosed with breast cancer.

In the night’s opening match, Louisville delighted the crowd at the KFC Yum Center in downtown Louisville. The Cardinals played with the pressure of desperately wanting to make it to the final four in its home city. Now, the Cardinals have made it all the way to the last match of the season.

Pitt had defeated the Cardinals twice in ACC play in the regular season, but Louisville won the match that mattered most.

“That pressure is suffocating, and there were moments in this season when we were suffocated,” Louisville coach Dani Busboom Kelly said of the Cardinals’ desire to get to the final four. “But this team really rose above that, and we had to put a lot of work in, and a lot of honest conversations about what it was going to take to overcome that.”

Then in Thursday’s match, the Cardinals had to overcome several other things: The Panthers winning the first set, trailing Pitt early in the second set, facing four set points in the third set and losing senior standout Anna DeBeer to an ankle injury at the start of the fourth set.

Louisville prevailed over all of it, leaving Pitt to deal with a fourth consecutive season ending in the national semifinals. Pitt also lost to Louisville in the national semis in 2022. The Panthers’ only loss this season before Thursday was 3-2 at SMU in October. Olivia Babcock had 33 kills to lead Pitt, which finished the season 33-2.

“We’re hurting,” Pitt coach Dan Fisher said. “This is one of the tougher losses of my career. It certainly feels like a missed opportunity.”

The Panthers and Cardinals have become the ACC’s most powerful programs in recent years, although Stanford and Cal joining the league this year brought a lot of volleyball prestige. Stanford has won a record nine NCAA titles, and Cal has made it to the final four.

Pitt won the regular-season matches against Louisville 3-2 in Pittsburgh on Oct. 25 and 3-1 in Louisville on Nov. 27. The Cardinals were the fourth of the No. 1 seeds — behind Pitt, Nebraska and Penn State — and were nearly bounced in the second round by Northern Iowa in one of the most intense matches of the NCAA tournament. But Louisville prevailed over UNI 22-20 in the fifth set, which featured nine match points.

The Cardinals swept Purdue and beat Stanford 3-1 to make their third trip to the final four. Thursday, they were led by DeBeer, Charitie Luper and Sofia Maldonado Diaz each getting 14 kills.

When DeBeer went out after injuring her ankle with the Cardinals up 2-0 in the fourth set, freshman Payton Petersen came in and had two kills and four crucial digs to help the Cardinals win. Petersen’s mother, Bobbi, coaches Northern Iowa and her twin sister plays for UNI, so it had already been an emotional tournament for Payton, having defeated them.

“It just felt weird,” Petersen said of facing her mom and sister in an NCAA tournament match, adding that UNI pushing Louisville so hard ended up helping the Cardinals improve their play for the rest of the tournament.

When DeBeer initially went down Thursday, Petersen figured she would be able to shake it off and return. When it became clear she wouldn’t be able to do that, Pedersen said, “I wanted to do this for her. She’s meant so much to me.”

As for DeBeer, Busboom Kelly said in a interview on the ESPN broadcast right after the match that the outside hitter would be back for Sunday’s final. But in the postmatch news conference, she tempered that.

“If there’s any inkling she can play, she’s the type of kid that’s going to get out there and play,” Busboom Kelly said of DeBeer. “But we won’t know more until tomorrow.”