As the saying goes, even the darkest of days have a silver lining. The last game between Ohio State and Buckeye Nation remains a stark example of the same. While the women’s sports in the NCAA realm have been receiving significant traction in recent times, the Ohio State women’s volleyball team achieved a historic feat despite falling to Michigan. Breaking their program’s attendance record, Ohio State recorded a whopping 8844 fans attendance in their very first game at the Schottenstein Center. 

This was also the highest attendance recorded by the Ohio State Buckeyes for its regular season collegiate matches. Well, with such an achievement under the belt, it is pretty normal to get excited. Taking to their official X account, the Ohio State Women’s Volleyball wrote, “Thank you, Buckeye Nation, for helping us make history with the program’s attendance record and the Ohio regular season collegiate attendance record in our first match EVER in the Schott… We really have the best fans in the land.” Now, while the crowd turning up in large numbers is definitely a great sign, the match unfortunately did not go quite according to their plan. 

The match started in a promising manner for Ohio State. With the girls dominating the entirety of the first set, Ohio looked set to go through. However, Michigan pulled out a ‘hold my beer’ moment right at the fag end of the first set. They came from behind to snatch the last six points, taking the score to 26-24 in their favor. Having suffered a heartbreak on the first, Ohio State came back strong and had a cracker of a second set. 

To give a glimpse of the back-and-forth action, the second set saw the lead change hands 11 times while featuring 14 ties. But once again, it was Michigan who held the nerves, taking the set 25-23. The Buckeyes’ only happy moment came in the third set when they managed to thwart the Michigan danger 25-20.

With the game hanging in balance 2-1, Michigan ensured that they did not have any further slip-ups and won the final set 25-21, along with the match. Now, with the crowds flocking in to catch all the action live, the interest in NCAA volleyball has seen quite a rise in recent times. Surprisingly, it also overtook the popularity of basketball a few days ago!

NCAA volleyball reigns supreme

Paris 2024 was a pleasant outing for the Team USA women’s volleyball athletes. Missing out on the gold by a whisker, the women set the tone and injected excitement into the fans to catch them live more often. In the ongoing 2024-25 season, the numbers produced by women’s volleyball are quite staggering. In a September 18 game between Nebraska and Stanford, the peak views recorded at 7 pm CT on BTN were 325,000. Likewise, the face-off between Louisville and Kentucky also crossed the threshold of 300k views. Garnering a peak of 318,000 views on ESPN at 6 pm CT, the numbers are creating some interesting records. 

The average views of NCAA volleyball are beating the viewership of men’s basketball! While this is quite astonishing to believe, the numbers are indeed favoring the volleyball game both in terms of average and peak viewership. And not only basketball, but baseball also seems to be lagging quite behind in terms of viewership.

While a Texas vs Baylor game recorded a moderate 296,000 viewers at 8 pm on ESPN, a baseball game in the same time slot had only 222,000 viewers. Thus, with volleyball growing in stature, things have been looking quite bright for the sport. And now, with people starting to turn up in person as well, the future of the game will surely be an interesting prospect to watch.