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Hallie Grossman
DANI BUSBOOM KELLY began carrying blazers for her largest volleyball matches lengthy earlier than she took over as coach of the perfect program within the nation.
Again in 2019, years previous to her return residence to Nebraska, Busboom Kelly, in her third 12 months as Louisville head coach, laid out an array of Cardinal crimson jackets for her mom’s enter.
Bonnie Busboom ticked off her approval till she disapproved. I do not know what I take into consideration that one.
She surveyed the crimson sequin blazer in entrance of her. It struck her as audacious, brash. Her daughter’s group at the moment was wonderful however unremarkable. Actually not accustomed to splashy wins or deep match runs. Ought to the coach be peacocking round in sequins?
I prefer it. However I do not learn about carrying it.
Busboom Kelly appeared on board together with her mom’s logic. She instructed her group she would not break it out for an enormous match as a result of she could not tolerate dropping in sequins. Till No. 2-seeded Texas got here alongside within the third spherical of the NCAA match.
“Then she walked out with that crimson sequin blazer on,” Bonnie says. “And I simply thought, ‘Dani Busboom, what are you doing?’”
Here is what: She was placing Louisville — and her personal head teaching bona fides — on the map.
The Longhorns had been driving a 13-year run of reaching the regional finals; the Cardinals had by no means made the Elite Eight. Louisville put an finish to each streaks that day, profitable in 5 units, and Bonnie tried to think about what should’ve gone by means of Texas coach Jerritt Elliott’s head when he caught sight of that blazer. “He in all probability thought, ‘You little s—,’” she says.
That blazer meant one thing, is Bonnie’s level. The blazer was the purpose.
“It stated, ‘I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of nothin’.’”
HERE ARE SOME issues that Dani Busboom Kelly, by all rights, could possibly be afraid of:
Taking on for a residing legend: John Cook dinner spent 25 years teaching volleyball in Lincoln, Nebraska, and far of that quarter century profitable at historic charges — together with 4 nationwide championships — by the point he referred to as it a profession in January.
Taking on for a residing legend at Nebraska: This volleyball program steeps itself in mystique and glory, and the relentless churn of expectations that include each.
Taking on for a residing legend at Nebraska in Nebraska: Busboom Kelly was born and raised on this place, identical to her dad and mom and their dad and mom earlier than them. And so forth and so forth. This was not a job relocation. This was a homecoming.
Dani Busboom Kelly, what are you doing?
IT’S THE EARLY days of November, and Busboom Kelly sits in her still-pretty-new workplace within the Devaney Heart, considering why, precisely, these realities of hers are distinctive. Complicated, even. However not, to her, all that daunting.
Over her proper shoulder, a framed image reveals her in that sequin blazer, fist-pumping on the sideline in her Louisville days. Over her left shoulder, floor-to-ceiling home windows overlook Nebraska’s residence court docket. John Baylor, who has referred to as play-by-play for Nebraska volleyball for 3 many years, calls that court docket the “Biggest Present on Taraflex,” and as of late, it is housed within the recently-christened John Cook dinner Area.
Busboom Kelly coaches below the intense lights of Cook dinner’s identify, which glow fluorescent above the Jumbotron, and some hundred ft from his bronze likeness, because of the statue that was devoted exterior the world in September. Generally she finds herself face-to-face with the person himself. Cook dinner is now a Huge Ten Community analyst, and he often winds up interviewing his former — and Busboom Kelly’s present — gamers.
She works in his literal shadow. However she doesn’t really feel overshadowed.
For starters, if Cook dinner is sacred right here, then she is one in every of his most trustworthy acolytes.
“I lived this place firsthand my entire life,” she says. “I perceive what he was doing each single day for our sport, for Nebraska. So it is like, ‘Yeah, he deserves it.’”
Serving to Busboom Kelly’s trigger, after all, is that she has spent her first 12 months again in Lincoln below a form of reverse Murphy’s Regulation, the place every thing that may go proper has gone ridiculously proper. Her group is undefeated and sits unanimously ranked at No. 1; the Huskers did not drop a set for 2 months starting in mid-September, a 48-set win streak that ended just a few weeks in the past in opposition to UCLA. They’ve swept their manner by means of the primary two rounds of the NCAA match. Now they will tackle Kansas within the Candy Sixteen on Friday and, simply perhaps, face off in opposition to her previous group, Louisville, within the Elite Eight.
However even wanting the near-perfection Busboom Kelly has helped steer in Nebraska — and all of the goodwill that engenders — she has a tough time seeing herself being cowed by Cook dinner.
“I do know him,” she says. “I’ve labored with him, and talked with him. For years.”
It is awfully laborious to really feel intimidated by somebody, or the shadow of somebody, you recognize like that. Particularly somebody you as soon as instructed to shove off.
The well-tread story goes like this: Forward of Busboom Kelly’s senior season at Nebraska, Cook dinner — in his sixth 12 months as head coach — requested her to change positions. The Huskers had been contemporary off dropping a nationwide title in 2005, had been additionally dropping their defensive specialist at libero, and had a younger, proficient setter named Rachel Holloway ready within the wings. Holloway had been a beginning setter and captain for the USA Youth Nationwide Workforce earlier than committing to Nebraska; it made sense to Cook dinner, then, for Busboom Kelly, a three-year starter at setter, to transition to the open spot. Busboom Kelly had zero heat for the concept.
“Dani received fairly heated within the assembly and left, and I did not see her for 3 days,” Cook dinner says. “She mainly flipped me off and left my workplace. I believed she was gonna stop.”
Bonnie Busboom swears Cook dinner is revising somewhat historical past right here. He did not see Busboom Kelly for 3 days as a result of it was winter break, she factors out. He in all probability did not see anybody for 3 days. However she does provide, with a smile, that the 2 had a propensity for butting heads. Cook dinner pushed Busboom Kelly, and she or he’d push him proper again. She was a bit rebellious; he did not respect freelancing one little bit. The mixture could possibly be flamable.
“The entire thing was satisfaction,” Bonnie says. “It was simply getting beat out. As a result of, in truth, Dani Busboom had by no means been beat out in something.”
Busboom Kelly internalized the transfer to libero as a slight, which morphed right into a dare. She determined she could be an elite libero — a place she had by no means performed — and in about six months, she was. The Huskers received the NCAA championship in 2006 with Busboom Kelly anchoring their protection.
After commencement, she discovered a 9-to-5 workplace job in insurance coverage did not fairly take, so she determined she could be an elite volleyball coach. Busboom Kelly was so single-minded in her pursuit that she failed to say to Lane Kelly — her husband now and longtime boyfriend then — that she had utilized for an assistant teaching job at Tennessee, not less than till she made the ultimate lower. She went to Knoxville to interview and a couple of week later, when Lane got here residence from work, she instructed him she received the job and was heading south. “You may come in order for you,” she stated.
They went, and she or he discovered herself taping strains on the court docket and ushering feral cats out of the apply area the group shared with ROTC. It was removed from glamorous, even farther from the trimmings of Nebraska, however she knew she might do that and be good at it. Anyplace.
“It was about doing one thing alone,” she says. “With out the Nebraska identify, with out that behind me.”
Assistant at Tennessee begat assistant at Louisville begat assistant at Nebraska begat head coach at Louisville, which changed into an eight-year clinic on the way to writer a program’s glow-up. She received 82% of her video games in these eight years, almost 90% within the final 4. “After we got here right here in 2021 at Louisville and swept Nebraska, that wasn’t after I felt like, ‘Oh, I needs to be the subsequent head coach at Nebraska’,” she says. “Nevertheless it did create a little bit of confidence. Like, ‘I can do that at a excessive degree.’”
Cook dinner watched all this unfold from afar, although by no means all that far. He employed Busboom Kelly as an assistant, then tried to rent her as affiliate head coach, as soon as she departed for her second stint in Louisville. However lengthy earlier than he coached together with her, then in opposition to her, Cook dinner caught glimpses of the coach Busboom Kelly would turn out to be.
The primary time Cook dinner visited her in highschool, on the farm the place she grew up, 25 miles south of Lincoln, Busboom Kelly confirmed him the motivational quotes she had scribbled in marker alongside her bed room’s cinderblock partitions. “She was having huge desires, even again then,” Cook dinner says. “She did not realize it on the time, however she was already beginning to prepare to teach.”
Their conflict over shifting to libero? “That was a part of her forming into what it means to be a coach,” he says. “Understanding generally it’s important to make powerful selections.”
Cook dinner had lengthy seen Busboom Kelly as a coach. Then he noticed her as the one coach he wished to take over Nebraska.
By final winter, Louisville had been pushing for Busboom Kelly to signal a brand new contract with a prohibitive buyout clause. (The contract she had in place had a buyout, however carved out an exception for one college: Nebraska.) He knew that she was anticipating her second youngster, that the roots she had planted in Louisville had been rising deeper. Cook dinner had already begun pondering retirement after which, out of the blue and urgently, the timing felt proper for him. Partly due to her.
Busboom Kelly was again in Nebraska for an expert volleyball match in January, and Cook dinner facilitated a gathering between her and Nebraska’s athletic director, Troy Dannen. Inside an hour of that meet-up, Dannen instructed Cook dinner what Cook dinner already knew: “She’s the one.”
THE DRILL, AS far as Rebekah Allick can inform, is unnecessary.
Nebraska’s senior center blocker would not know the place to go throughout a November apply, her teammates do not both. A Huskers’ assistant coach resorts to yelling out the names of gamers and the place they need to be, however confusion abounds. Busboom Kelly, standing subsequent to Allick, makes an attempt to make clear.
Busboom Kelly: “Offense, you turn each 5. Protection, each 10.”
Allick: “Wait a minute. You simply instructed me the alternative.”
Busboom Kelly, embracing the absurdity of the second, rests her head on Allick’s shoulder, and laughs. “Simply give me a minute,” she says.
Dani Busboom Kelly, what are you doing?
It is a minor bout of turbulence throughout an in any other case idyllic 12 months in Nebraska volleyball. However together with her coach’s head on her shoulder, Allick thinks to herself: “Dani’s human.”
“It is an appreciation truthfully,” she says. “Like, ‘Thanks for displaying your humanness.’ I simply really feel like we will all breathe.”
The volleyball group has been so good for thus lengthy, so unyielding in its dominance, that it instructions greater than consideration. It compels worship.
A sampling: Nebraska’s residence sell-out streak dates to 2001, which makes it the longest streak in NCAA ladies’s sports activities historical past. This 12 months, the Huskers lead the NCAA in common attendance (8,575); the second-highest common attendance within the nation belongs to … Nebraska, when it performs exterior of Lincoln (8,151). Two years in the past, they traded Devaney for Memorial Stadium for one evening, and 92,003 folks — a world file for a ladies’s sporting occasion — crammed the soccer stadium for a volleyball match. Within the 2022 fiscal 12 months, there have been 522 ladies’s athletics packages within the ACC, Huge East, Huge Ten, Huge 12, SEC and Pac-12, however in keeping with the Lincoln Journal Star, just one that turned a revenue: Nebraska volleyball.
The devotion to this system has been rewarded: 5 nationwide championships; essentially the most wins in NCAA Division I historical past; the one program to be ranked in each High 25 American Volleyball Coaches Affiliation rankings because the weekly ballot’s introduction in 1982.
Nebraska volleyball is inevitable, a ceaselessly form of greatness. Besides Nebraskans have heard that story earlier than.
“In the end, what I didn’t wish to have occur to Nebraska volleyball,” Cook dinner says, “is what occurred to Nebraska soccer.”
The Huskers as soon as had a soccer group with that ceaselessly form of greatness. Then ceaselessly ended. As sort as this century has been to Nebraska volleyball, it has distributed cruelty to Nebraska soccer, introducing one thing worse than mediocrity: irrelevance.
Busboom Kelly carries the burden of shepherding Nebraska away from that scourge of ordinariness. And she or he’s doing it in ways in which really feel unusual, unorthodox. With lightness.
By the tip of her time in Louisville, the Cardinals had been dominating at a Huskers-like tempo, however profitable — not less than at historic clips — was nonetheless a novelty, every victory merited a celebration. Right here, at Nebraska, “I’m going into the locker room and it is like” — her voice goes limp, her arms droop in a dull wave — “‘yay, we received.’ I wish to make certain we’re nonetheless having fun with the journey.”
Lane, who performed soccer at Nebraska, as soon as attended a Southern Cal apply whereas visiting an previous teammate again within the Pete Carroll days. Snoop Dogg was standing on the sideline, music blared — it felt like a celebration. It felt mild. When Lane thinks of Dani Busboom Kelly the coach, he thinks of that day with the Trojans. Nebraska’s practices have their very own taste, but it surely’s mild there too. Busboom Kelly has been recognized to indicate up with under-eye masks nonetheless on, the little half-moons caught firmly in place.
“I might say taking part in for her feels very … free,” says Harper Murray, Nebraska’s star exterior hitter.
Murray did not take to Busboom Kelly immediately, which she says had every thing to do together with her attachment to Cook dinner. The 2 had been so related that earlier than Cook dinner delivered the information of his retirement to the group in January, he referred to as Murray into his workplace to inform her first. Murray could not wrap her head round pouring herself into a brand new particular person the way in which she had with Cook dinner. However glimpses of who Busboom Kelly was — and the massive and paradigm-shifting methods she was completely different from Cook dinner — chipped away at Murray’s resistance.
Cook dinner was a CEO; at occasions he could possibly be inflexible and unrelenting. Although Busboom Kelly is Cook dinner’s disciple, she isn’t his mirror picture. She would not view this enterprise with grave severity and self-seriousness, and that frees her to be joyful within the course of, to permit laughter to creep into apply, even when errors are made. She’s open to taking dangers, say, when she flouts standard knowledge with a slew of participant substitutions in any match, at any level. She might be emotionally weak, like when she gave the Huskers the beginning lineup for the primary time and confessed that it was laborious, that she wished she might put everybody on the market. Murray remembers considering then that she had solely seen Cook dinner cry as soon as, at his retirement, and it was a wierd however great factor to be let on this manner now.
That does not imply Busboom Kelly would not press them generally, or royally annoy them at different occasions, or would not deliver her personal particular model of urgency.
“John demanded perfection,” Allick says. “Dani calls for excellence.”
The daylight between these two calls for has left her gamers unburdened. As a result of as a lot as they extol the privileges of taking part in this sport on this place, there is a value to it too.
“I would like our group to really feel the burden of the group,” Busboom Kelly says. “I do not need our group to really feel the burden of the state.”
BONNIE BUSBOOM PICKED up a cellphone name from her daughter in January.
“I am doing it,” she stated. “We’re coming residence.”
Information of Nebraska’s teaching earthquake — Cook dinner’s shock retirement; Busboom Kelly’s insta-hiring — had but to go public, so Bonnie was sworn to secrecy. She referred to as solely her husband, Gene, who was 15 miles away working the household farm.
“Dani’s coming residence,” she instructed him. (Gene, in a little bit of Midwestern aptitude, responded: “Oh. Nice.”)
A number of days later, with the information set to interrupt, Bonnie instructed a detailed circle of household and mates. She phoned Busboom Kelly’s childhood pal, Jenny Lempka. “She’s coming residence.” She referred to as one other lifelong pal, Laura Francke. “She’s coming residence.”
By the point the Huskers formally launched Busboom Kelly as their new coach — solely its fourth in program historical past — at a press convention within the first week of February, a wholesome share of Nebraskans had labored themselves right into a lather. That day, she was welcomed again to Lincoln in entrance of college brass and media and what, Nebraskans swear, should’ve been the entire of Gage County, the place Busboom Kelly was born and raised.
The college helped her previous Ok-12 college, Freeman, constitution a pair of buses to the occasion; the college needed to constitution another to satisfy demand. Andrew Havelka, the superintendent, made the journey and estimates the Freeman part was 500 robust — although he heard rumors of as many as 600 or 700. (A determine, it is value noting, that exceeds the 604-person inhabitants of Adams, Nebraska, the city that is residence to Freeman.)
The joke went that it will be an excellent day to rob the Adams Financial institution, although that will’ve been an actual disgrace for Lempka, whose household has owned the financial institution that anchors Most important Road in Adams for 5 generations. That is the way it works right here. Everybody is aware of everybody else. Everybody is aware of Dani Busboom Kelly, or not less than seems like they do.
“There’s not very many acquaintances,” she says. “It is extra such as you kinda take into account everyone household.”
Lempka left Adams for a stretch and joked that by the point she moved again, she might inform years had handed as a result of she knew who drove which vehicles, they usually had been all driving new ones. Now she lives two doorways down from Bonnie and Gene, who traded their home on the household farm in close by Cortland, the place Busboom Kelly grew up, for “metropolis life” in Adams a couple of 12 months in the past. Havelka lives about 5 homes away. Gene used to teach softball at Freeman; Busboom Kelly’s sister-in-law teaches there now. Sheila Day oversees the Cortland Museum, stationed in a 142-year-old white clapboard home, and she or he’s household too. Day’s sister is married to Busboom Kelly’s uncle.
Day takes care to notice the Busbooms’ lengthy footprint on this city, which is preserved within the museum. There’s the museum’s new Busboom Kelly show, full with a biography and images of her Nebraska athletics lineage. Gerald, Gene’s father, is there too, palming a basketball in a black-and-white {photograph} of the 1951 Beatrice Instances Dream Workforce.
Cortland is tiny, a village that was initially specified by a corn area again within the Eighties and has the texture that not all that a lot has modified within the intervening centuries.
And so Busboom Kelly was a farm child, like almost all Cortland children. Her household farm sits off State Freeway 41, a mile-and-half down a dust street, and a quarter-mile in any path from their closest neighbor. The Busbooms farm corn and beans, and lift cattle too.
Busboom Kelly liked a lot about that farm. The plot of land the place she and her youthful brother would play softball with Gene when he took a break from farming — if the ball landed within the hog lot, it was a house run. The pond on her grandmother’s land a couple of miles down the street the place she’d take Lane and their mates for tenting journeys in faculty, breathers from Lincoln and what it meant to be an athlete there.
After Bonnie and Gene moved out, their son Ryan moved in, and a brand new technology of Busbooms will now develop to reside and love the land. Busboom Kelly’s nephews are in her previous room, the place motivational quotes had been as soon as plastered on the partitions. Her son, Boone, visits and likes to suppose the bulls on the property are his personal.
In a post-match radio present this season, Cook dinner took a quick break from volleyball to speak farming and mixing. He will not be from Nebraska, however he earned his stripes in 25 years. Busboom Kelly chimed in to say her father had simply wrapped up his harvest. Baylor, the play-by-play man, listened to their dialog and weighed in, “That is the primary post-match coach’s interview within the historical past of the game the place the pinnacle coach stated, ‘My dad has the harvest in.’”
“It is simply … it is shifting,” he says. “Should you grew up right here, it strikes you. You are tied to the land.”
Busboom Kelly isn’t the primary Nebraskan referred to as again to this land. Scott Frost had his personal homecoming right here eight years in the past. He, too, grew up in small-town Nebraska, went on to be a Husker, received a championship, then got here again to guide his former group. He did not survive his fifth season as head soccer coach earlier than being fired.
Busboom Kelly isn’t Frost, and the volleyball program she inherited isn’t the soccer program he did. About that is a lot, Cook dinner is adamant: Frost merely didn’t come armed with the program-building expertise that Busboom Kelly did. And by the point Frost returned residence, Nebraska’s soccer group was in free fall. Busboom Kelly, then again, was given the “keys to a Ferrari,” Cook dinner says. That a lot was by design. He wanted to set her up for achievement as a result of he could not abide a Nebraska football-like implosion; he could not abdomen one other homecoming going up in smoke.
To make certain, it is understanding simply wonderful thus far for Busboom Kelly. However the specter of different homecomings gone improper doesn’t plague her.
“I really feel like I’m perhaps somewhat bit completely different than a lotta Nebraskans,” she says. “I actually might see myself being comfortable in quite a lot of locations.”
She has roots right here however would not really feel the have to be rooted right here. And so teaching in Nebraska isn’t her burden. It is her present.
She and Lane liked their years in Louisville, sufficient that, after the whirlwind of coming residence to Nebraska settled, she felt a twinge of one thing unusual and sudden: reverse homesickness.
“It was a bizarre feeling to course of,” she says. “I am residence however I am feeling homesick for someplace else.”
And but, there by no means actually could possibly be someplace else, not less than not now, and never with out giving this Nebraska experiment a real run.
“If I did not do that,” she says, “it would be the largest remorse of my life.”
On the household farm, there is a rock formation in entrance of her childhood home. Etched onto the stone: “THE BUSBOOMS.”
She is tied to the land.
NOT FAR FROM that rock, again when the home was nonetheless Bonnie’s and Gene’s, a trampoline sat exterior. Busboom Kelly could be out on the trampoline quite a bit, mendacity down, trying up on the stars at evening. She could not camp out on the grass as a result of too many bugs would get her, so she’d take refuge on the trampoline, lookup and suppose.
“Simply appreciating what’s round her,” Bonnie surmises. “However eager about no matter’s happening too.”
The trampoline is lengthy gone, and Busboom Kelly hardly has any time for quiet reflection as of late. She’s managing the No. 1 group within the nation, and she or he has two boys at residence — Boone, her toddler, and Jett, who was born only a few months after they got here again to Nebraska.
“I believe it would be completely different if I used to be single, or even when I used to be simply married with out children,” she says. “There’d be extra time to take a seat and stew and overthink.”
Again when John Cook dinner was employed 25 years in the past, he heard from a slew of people that instructed him to not take the Nebraska job. What was he going to have the ability to do this Nebraska volleyball had not achieved already? He kicked off his tenure by going undefeated and profitable a nationwide championship in his first season, then added a number of extra titles and historic dominance to their ledger alongside the way in which. So now, all these years later, that very same query could possibly be rightfully requested of Busboom Kelly. What might she probably do?
“Possibly win back-to-back,” she says. “That hasn’t been achieved right here. And there hasn’t been a dynasty.”
In all of the many years Nebraska has been on the pinnacle of collegiate volleyball, there’s at all times been a handful of years between every championship. A second, nonetheless temporary, when this place that lionizes volleyball could not lay declare to its crown.
“So I believe that is perhaps one thing I might do.”
There is no trampoline, no huge Nebraska evening sky overhead. However she’s nonetheless appreciating what’s round her, nonetheless eager about what is going on on and what’s but to come back.
Dani Busboom Kelly, what are you going to do subsequent?
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