Volleyball fans, get ready for an absolute showdown! The 2025 TCNIT in Kansas City welcomes over 670 club teams who will compete for championships as Triple Crown Sports joins forces with League One Volleyball to launch the inaugural LOVB Classic. The mid-season LOVB Classic tournament will gather all six LOVB Pro teams at Municipal Auditorium for a winner-takes-all competition from February 14-16, 2025 right before the KC Convention Center youth tournament. The volleyball world will get a fresh spark from seasoned professionals, Olympic medalists, and NCAA-rookies-turned-pros joining forces to create an intense competition.

And just when you thought things couldn’t get any bigger, comes the real game-changer—LOVB Pro is putting some serious cash on the line! The league just dropped a massive $100,000 prize pool to make this already electrifying event even more intense. With volleyball skyrocketing in popularity, this kind of high-stakes, elite-level action proves that the sport is not just thriving—it’s taking over!

Avid Volley hopped on X on February 14 to drop some major cash news, announcing, “(first): $100,000. (second): $40,000. (third): $20,000.” Talk about high-stakes volleyball!

Hold up—Avid Volley spilled some more tea! The LOVB Classic MVP is walking away with a cool $10,000. Yep, the stakes just got even hotter! The action kicks off on February 14, with Madison throwing down against Houston, followed by Austin clashing with Salt Lake. And the winners? They’ll battle it out with the two stop seeds Omaha and Atlanta on the 15th for a shot at glory. The three-day volleyball spectacle will take place alongside the Triple Crown NIT to create a perfect opportunity for junior and professional athletes to come together.

“The explosive growth of volleyball is commanding attention in many places, and the TC NIT is thrilled to work alongside LOVB to show our customer base of student-athletes that professional volleyball is a living, breathing enterprise,” said Jared Rudiger, director of the TC NIT. Rudiger is bang on with his assessment. The pro volleyball leagues in the U.S. are definitely on the rise. But there’s more.

Women’s volleyball has woken up to a new dawn

Women’s volleyball is dominating the scene by growing rapidly in popularity. People are attending games in numbers and breaking records. Montana Kaimin’s December report laid it all out: volleyball is captivating audiences like never before. Need proof? In August 2023, Nebraska and Omaha delivered a monumental record-shattering moment by drawing 92,003 spectators to their women’s sporting event, thus setting a new world record for attendance at a women’s sporting event. What’s more? The indoor NCAA semi-finals drew 19,598 spectators who established a new attendance record before fans exceeded that mark at the championship event with 19,727 spectators witnessing Texas defeating Nebraska. That was a jaw-dropping 44.7% jump from 2007. But guess what? Even that was bested last year with 21, 860 attending the 2024 NCAA final between Penn State and Louisville.

The television audience numbers rise in parallel with stadium attendance growth. ESPN documented that the 2023 NCAA championship match delivered 1.7 million viewers in its competition against NFL broadcasts and this number soared by a staggering 115% compared to the previous year. During regular season matches, the viewing numbers increased by 58 percent while reaching peak viewership ratings of 808,000.

NCAA President Charlie Baker put it best, “This is not the end, this is a trend. The sport has tremendous momentum with the fan community, but it also has tremendous momentum with young people. Young women are getting into this sport in a big way, and I think that means nothing but positivity and growth going forward.” And as Baker had predicted, the momentum spilled over to the following year as well with the 2024 NCAA Women’s Volleyball tournament becoming the most-watched ever!

And the global stage? Oh, it’s expanding too! The 2025 Volleyball Nations League will expand its participation to 18 teams from both genders to elevate the sport to new heights. Last year, the league saw a 13% increase in attendance from 2023 with the pool phases attracting a whopping 751,000 fans from all over the world. And while the Men’s Finals reached a sell-out rate of 78%, the Women’s Finals left them far behind with 84%. So yeah, volleyball isn’t just trending—it’s rewriting the playbook on how women’s sports are celebrated, and we’re all here for it!