Photos courtesy Marc Lebryk/Indy Ignite
The hardest ticket to get in Indiana sports last year was a seat in Holloway Gymnasium during one of Purdue’s No. 8–ranked volleyball team’s sold-out games. The tickets were as hot as the Indiana Fever’s—priced around $400 for a courtside seat and $40 for a nosebleed—but not nearly as plentiful in a college arena that maxes out at 2,288. A few years ago, you could buy a general admission ticket at the box office right before a game. Not anymore. “Purdue has stayed on the national scene for a long time with a lot of talent,” says Dan Meske, host of the Out of Rotation volleyball podcast and a coach at the University of Louisville, the site of the 2024 NCAA Championship last month.
He’s right. Holloway is intimate, packed, and loud with a raucous student section, pep band, and theme nights. It plays host to the powerhouse Big Ten programs that dominate the NCAA’s Top 10 and have won half the national titles in the last 20 years. When Purdue moved a couple games to the 14,000-seat Mackey Arena last season, those sold out, too. College volleyball has never seen the kind of crowds that turned out in 2024.
But fans don’t just watch the explosive game up close and personal. They feel its ballistic force. Each point starts with the server targeting a specific player on the other team, that player bumping it to the setter, and the setter, like a quarterback, choosing which hitter to pass to. That hitter gets a running start and leaps 10 feet in the air, slamming the ball past (or into) the block on the other side.
Then all hell breaks loose.
A defender sets her body in the line of fire, absorbing the force and controlling the pass to her setter. The setter scrambles under the ball and lets it fly across the court, placing it a certain distance off the net. A hitter launches and booms another hit at 70 miles per hour. Let’s say it catches the blocker’s fingertips and slows down just enough for another defender to have a chance. That player might chase it off the court, dive headfirst to the ground, and bat it high with one arm before somersaulting to her feet. Another hitter might pick it out of the sky and spike it back. A defender could skid forward on her belly and jut an open hand under the ball right before it hits the ground—a “pancake” save.
This repeats five, six, seven times. Bodies flying, crashing, rolling. Ponytails swinging. Speed meeting skill. Power versus precision. It’s hard to say which is more mind-blowing, a hitter rearing back ferociously above the 7-foot-tall net or an airborne defender going fully horizontal to keep a ball in play. It’s predatory and survivalist in rapid succession, one body-flinging spectacle after another.
It’s easy to see why volleyball is catching on—the fast-paced exhilaration is a new high in American sports. “The intensity is so focused and isolated,” says Mary Kay Huse, CEO of Indiana’s just-formed women’s professional volleyball team, Indy Ignite. “You can’t see it in other sports like you can in volleyball. That’s why we’ve seen the NCAA viewership rise so fast. Once people start watching, they don’t stop watching.” An entrepreneur who grew up in Lebanon, Indiana, Huse is herself a former collegiate athlete. And her daughter plays the sport.
You’ll get to experience it yourself at the brand-new Fishers Event Center this month. The Ignite debuts on January 11 as one of the new teams in the Pro Volleyball Federation (PVF), in the league’s second season. The cutting-edge, 7,500-seat bowl-style venue (which also hosts the Indy Fuel hockey club, the Fishers Freight indoor football team, and a lineup of touring performers in the shadow of Ikea) is perfectly scaled for watching volleyball. Too big can feel empty. This hits the sweet spot.
The game’s leaders think the time has come for volleyball to soar as a professional sport in the United States. Other than the national teams, indoor volleyball has never lasted here, which, on paper, is puzzling. Especially given that the sport’s excitement and gym-class familiarity are so fan-friendly. Most people understand the concept of bump, set, spike. And the scoring is easy—first to 25, ahead by two, best of five sets.
There are but a few points of confusion—the hard-to-follow player rotation, for example—and certain infractions, such as a double contact or a lift, are difficult to see from the stands. A spectator who has played the backyard version their whole life might question why the pro teams get to touch the ball four times. (It’s because a block isn’t considered contact.) They might also wonder why one player’s jersey is a different color. (That’s the libero, a defensive specialist whose substitutions don’t count toward the team limit.)
After a while, the biggest question might dawn on them: If professional volleyball is so fun to watch, so approachable, and so marketable, why is it just now coming to the United States? And why is Indianapolis one of the few markets where it’s starting?
Photos courtesy Marc Lebryk/Indy Ignite
Five years ago, the Indiana Pacers produced a documentary series about Hoosier hoops called We Grow Basketball Here. “Excellence, tradition. Then and now. It’s who we are,” the narrator declared over clips of Crispus Attucks players and Reggie Miller.
Volleyball is the soybean to basketball’s corn. We produce a lot of it, too, but without the cultural branding. No one builds soybean mazes in the fall or says, “There’s more than soybeans in Indiana.” Quietly, though, the Munciana Volleyball junior program, based in Yorktown just outside of Muncie, has been sprouting top national talent for decades and is one of the growth engines in volleyball. It’s called the “cradle of coaches” (44 current NCAA and NAIA coaches started there) and sends players to the best NCAA teams. Indiana now has a few nationally ranked junior volleyball clubs, including Circle City and Empowered Volleyball Academy in Fort Wayne, and about 10,000 high-schoolers play statewide.
The growth in the sport’s participation and quality has spread to TV audiences. Volleyball is the third most-watched sport on the Big Ten Network, behind men’s basketball and football. “I have friends who played in the NFL and MLB, and if I can get them to watch one volleyball game, they’re hooked,” says Ignite coach George Padjen, a 25-year NCAA veteran.
In 2023, the sport popped. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which has one of the most storied college programs, kicked off its season in the football stadium. The sellout crowd of 92,000 set the world record for attendance at a women’s sporting event. In 2024, the sport aired on weekend network TV for the first time. The boom isn’t driven by a history-making superstar—there is no Caitlin Clark of women’s volleyball—or a storyline like South Carolina women’s basketball’s perfect season last year. Rather, the boom came organically and gradually as more tall girls chose volleyball over basketball, the quality of play improved, crowds grew, and TV followed. The Big Ten Network dedicated Wednesday nights to volleyball, and the ACC and SEC networks later did the same.
But after graduation, the best Americans play overseas, primarily in Europe, or they give up the sport and start adulting. Efforts to birth a league stateside have hinged on convincing top players to bypass the established pro leagues and paychecks elsewhere and take a chance on something new here. “The hardest thing is the skepticism in the volleyball community,” PVF co-founder Jen Spicher said on Meske’s podcast. “Nobody believed we were going to do it.”
Attitudes started turning around when the U.S. national team, stocked with players returning from topflight leagues abroad, won its first gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, boosting the sport’s profile and proving that we produce the most talent.
Soon, three pro volleyball leagues started taking shape in the States, this time gaining traction. One of them, Athletes Unlimited, plays a five-week fall season in one city. The other two, League One Volleyball and the PVF, both play in the winter and spring. League One is owned by some of the sport’s stars and uses a new model that includes running youth clubs and staging all games in only one market each week. Its inaugural season starts this month. The PVF follows the traditional path of privately owned franchises. It launched in seven cities last January and aired on CBS Sports Network. PVF players made a minimum of $60,000 (for the four-and-a-half-month season), and attendance exceeded expectations with 400,000 spectators across the league and more than 2 million people watching livestreams on YouTube.
This season, the Indy Ignite became the only new team to join the PVF. “A lot of volleyball leagues have been one and done,” Meske says. “Having a second year is even more impressive than having a first year.”
Photos courtesy Marc Lebryk/Indy Ignite
Ignite co-owner Jim Schumacher saw the potential for women’s pro volleyball from the perspective of a girl dad. His two daughters played for Munciana and went on to join NCAA teams. As a successful entrepreneur in the energy and private equity sectors, he’d see 20,000 people at a junior volleyball tournament and think, There has to be a business opportunity here. “I’m a startup guy. My wife and I read about this Pro Volleyball Federation a couple years ago and went after it,” says Schumacher, who shares ownership of the team with business partner Don Hutchinson of Goelzer Investment Management.
Competition for an expansion team was fierce from other bidders around the country, he says, but Indy’s proven track record in sports and Indiana’s strong volleyball community won in the end. For Shumacher, the new venture was a chance to combine three passions. “I love volleyball because I saw all the great experiences my kids had and how it taught them to win,” he says. “The second thing I love is finding the right people and saying, ‘I don’t know how we do this, but let’s go.’ And third, it’s a chance to do something cool for our community.”
The front office is led by Huse, a seasoned startup executive who, like Schumacher, played collegiate tennis. During the pandemic, she steered the Indy-based company Mandolin in pioneering virtual concerts, and in just its first year it was named the best live-music streaming platform at the prestigious Pollstar Awards. Kenzie Knuckles, a product of Munciana who started all four years at Nebraska, is in charge of player relations. Cathy Kightlinger, a former Indianapolis Star reporter and publicist for the IndyCar Series, leads communications. Head coach Padjen left his legendary post at Concordia University in Minnesota, where he took the program to its status as the winningest Division II volleyball team ever. He had a good thing going at Concordia, but the opportunity to coach pro was too tempting to pass up.
Padjen’s first phone call was to Sydney Hilley, an All-American setter from the University of Wisconsin. Hilley had trained with Padjen in her native Minnesota as a junior player. She later led Wisconsin to its first NCAA title while playing for coach Kelly Sheffield, himself a Munciana alum. Hilley was named the Big Ten Setter of the Year three times. After graduating, she played one season with a dominant team in Turkey, where volleyball players are stars, and another in Puerto Rico, then returned home to use her science degree. She earned a master’s in biotechnology and took a job with a medical device company.
Last year, Hilley was able to juggle her full-time job while playing for the PVF’s Omaha Supernovas in the league’s first year. She was named the playoff MVP and led Omaha to the league title. Then she signed with Indy to reunite with Padjen. “He’s one of the best technical coaches I’ve ever worked with,” she says.
Ten other Ignite players competed in the PVF’s inaugural season last year, including three Purdue alums (Grace Cleveland, Blake Mohler, and Maddie Schermerhorn) and star hitter Leketor Member-Meneh, an All-American who played college volleyball at Pittsburgh. Her former teammate, Chiamaka Nwokolo, joined the Ignite in last June’s draft after going to the Final Four with Pitt, which has the most NCAA wins since 2018. Setter Kylie Murr and hitter Carly Skjodt trained at Munciana and played in the Big Ten. Azhani Tealer won an NCAA championship with Kentucky, and Ainise Havili was a three-time All-American and twice Big 12 Setter of the Year. In November’s college draft, Ignite picked up outside hitter Anna DeBeer and libero Elena Scott, both from University of Louisville and known collectively at their alma mater as “The Duo.”
The Ignite has the potential to play as good as any team in the world. The rival pro league, League One, has the jump on the PVF in terms of marquee names from the ranks of the top Americans competing in Europe, but PVF landed quite a few distinguished players who don’t want to live overseas. For the athletes, it’s a chance to play in front of their families and friends again, which most of them didn’t believe they’d have the chance to do after college. The salaries are higher across the board than in Europe, too. “People can make good money overseas, but some girls play nine months for $10,000,” Hilley says. The PVF’s rookie salary this year is $60,000 (compared to around $70,000 for the WNBA), and star players can earn six figures—for less than six months of play. The Ignite also provides team housing.
Photos courtesy Marc Lebryk/Indy Ignite
The team bonded over dinner in Indianapolis in August last year, and Hilley says the conversation dove deep as they discussed why they play volleyball at all. This opportunity to pioneer the professional level in the U.S. has them fired up. They get to be the examples they didn’t have as junior players, when most of them didn’t know the sport was played professionally anywhere. “These girls want to succeed. They want to work their butts off. It made me so excited to come here and play,” Hilley says. She and a few Ignite teammates got a taste of the potential fandom when they made a promotional appearance at an Indiana Fever game last summer. “The people who came up to me were so excited,” she says. “They said they had just bought tickets, or didn’t even know the Ignite is a thing but now will come watch. It’s really cool to see how much people here really appreciate sports, but also like women’s sports.”
Indeed, Indiana Sports Corp announced last summer that it aims to make Indianapolis the women’s sports capital of the world by 2050. Details are short at this point, but the Ignite offered a data point when it sold more than 600 season tickets before the schedule was released in the fall, which was more than most PVF teams sold all season last year. The team is counting on Indiana’s thousands of volleyball players and their families to attend games.
As positive as the early indicators are, and as much as the PVF is investing to create a serious organization that offers livable salaries and has a network of pro venues, experienced front offices, and medical staffs, it’s no sure thing. The sport is still unknown to the general sports public. “You’ve still got to push tickets, you’ve got to get the word out, you’ve got to create the brand, and you’ve got to always stay in front of people,” Schumacher says. “You’ve still got to block and tackle.”
The fact that even a volleyball team owner reaches for a different sports metaphor to describe a volleyball team proves his point—volleyball is not part of the American sports lexicon. One thing insiders know, though, is that volleyball is all about positivity. That’s why it’s tradition for teams to huddle after every point and for the bench to dance and cheer on the sidelines. “Volleyball is nonstop picking each other up and supporting each other,” Schumacher says. “I love that piece of it.”
