Resurgent Omaha one of three Nebraska teams in NCAA Division I volleyball field
Matt Buttermore talks to his Omaha team before playing Nebraska/Omaha photos
By Greg Echlin for VolleyballMag.com
There was hardly a better way to play your third match of the season than outdoors with 92,003 fans looking on — the highest attended women’s sports event in history — in late August inside the University of Nebraska’s Memorial Stadium.
Unless, that is, you were on the opposite end of the floor facing the Huskers.
The Omaha Mavericks, a first-time NCAA tournament entry three months later, did that day. They showed up, never led and got swept.
“It was loud. It’s a different kind of coaching environment and playing environment,” said Matt Buttermore, the Mavericks coach since April 2019.
What’s more, it was part of a nine-match, season-opening losing streak.
Talk about a turnaround: Omaha (15-13) tied with three other teams atop The Summit League. Then the Mavericks beat Denver in five in the conference semifinals before pulling off a remarkable reverse sweep of Kansas City in the final, 18-25, 20-25, 26-24, 25-12, 15-11.
Now they in their first NCAA tournament when they travel to Kansas (23-5), the 14th seed overall and fourth in the Wisconsin region. Kansas swept Omaha on August 26. The winner of the 7 p.m. Central Thursday match plays again Friday against the winner of the earlier Thursday match between Yale and Penn State.
Omaha lost in the previous two Summit finals to South Dakota.
“We’re going to prepare our best, play a really good team in Kansas and see if we can punch through a couple more walls,” said Buttermore, the successor to Rose Shires who retired after 29 seasons.
Omaha is one of three Nebraska schools in the NCAA Tournament along with the aforementioned top-seeded Huskers and the other team in Omaha, 12th-seeded Creighton.
As if that doesn’t say enough about the state of volleyball in Nebraska, try this: Two more schools — the University of Nebraska-Kearney and Wayne State College — are in the NCAA Division II tournament.
“It’s really amazing for such a small (population) state,” Creighton coach Kirsten Bernthal Booth said.
As a No. 3 seed in the Pittsburgh Region, Creighton (27-4), the Big East Conference regular-season and tournament champion, opens against Colgate (22-7) on Friday. Nebraska (28-1) plays host to Long Island University (13-18).
Omaha’s climb to this point
Start with the football-stadium match last August 30.
The football part of the setting was familiar to Nebraska director of athletics Trev Alberts, once a Huskers gridiron hero on the school’s famed Blackshirt defense during the height of its 1990s football glory.
After his NFL career and a stint on ESPN as a football commentator, Alberts entered the world of college administration and eventually became the Omaha AD. He’s most prominently known in Omaha for eradicating Mavs football before moving on to his alma mater.
Since then, Omaha’s most successful sport has been men’s ice hockey —the Mavs made the NCAA Frozen Four in 2015 — and they’re routinely matched against the big, bad wolves from the more icy climates. But nothing could have matched the overwhelming feeling of playing volleyball in Memorial Stadium.
Buttermore said the Mavs tried to enjoy the moment, but added, “We would have liked to hit a little higher percentage, but it turns out Nebraska’s pretty good, too.”
Indeed, Omaha hit minus .080 against Nebraska that night. And then by falling into a rut with a record of 0-9 didn’t bode well for the Mavs’ chances to make the NCAA tournament.
“We knew that the teams we were competing against were really tough teams,” said senior McKenna Ruch, a middle blocker from Millard North High School on the outskirts of Omaha.
“We wished we had performed better, but at the same time we couldn’t be too hard on ourselves.”
There was nothing easy about Omaha’s early schedule. It lost to the SEC’s Texas A&M, also in the NCAA field, and then Kansas before playing Nebraska. The Mavs lost to Kansas State, Long Beach State and Iowa State — another NCAA tourney team — and then in five sets each to Northern Colorado and Wichita State, which are both playing in the NIVC.
Finally, on September 16 at Northern Colorado, Omaha broke through by sweeping Bradley.
Shayla McCormick
Outside hitter Shayla McCormick, a junior from Skutt Catholic in Omaha, had 12 kills, the most since she had 13 to open the season against A&M.
“When you lose that many games, you’ve got to look at what really matters,” Buttermore said. “When you don’t have the ego boost of winning, we went back to our values.”
To Buttermore, it meant sending a message that it was important for his players to remember why they’re in college. He implored them to prioritize the importance of positively impacting their lives and the lives of others.
“Who we become is more important than what we achieve, and that has to matter when you’re 0-9 just as much as when you’re 9-0,” Buttermore said.
Ruch cited the key factor in the Mavs turnaround: “Something that we’ve really worked hard on is our defense and our block.”
From the end of September to mid-October, the Mavs put together an eight-match winning streak. Ruch, the team leader in kills (291), had five straight matches with 10 more in that run.
Rachel Fairbanks
Outside hitter Rachel Fairbanks, a senior from Lansing, Kansas, was also a key performer with four double-doubles in kills and digs during that winning streak. Fairbanks, one of four Mavs with more than 200 kills this season, is the team leader in service aces.
The final barrier was the 2-0 deficit the Mavs faced against the top-seeded Kansas City Roos in the Summit tournament final.
“We weren’t doing too hot on defense at first. Once that turned around, we started getting more blocks and started digging more balls,” said Ruch, voted the tournament MVP.
But with 18 total blocks, the most in a match since 2018, the Mavs pulled off that reverse sweep. Fairbanks and McCormick each set a career-high in digs and largely contributed to the team’s 108 digs in the match, the Mavs’ most since 2017.
UNK ready in DII
Meanwhile, Nebraska-Kearney coach Rick Squiers was sweating out the at-large selections for the eight-team Central Region in the Division II tournament.
Rick Squiers
He knew the Lopers had strong enough credentials, but has been around the business long enough to know that tournament exclusion is not out of the question.
UNK is 28-5 after going 16-4 in the MIAA. In the conference tournament, the Lopers swept Northwest Missouri and Missouri Southern, but got swept in the final by Central Missouri, which took the automatic bid.
The at-large bit put UNK, the No. 6 seed in the eight-team region, against Southwest Minnesota (23-6) at noon Central Thursday in St. Paul, Minnesota. Second-seeded Wayne State College (28-2) follows against Minnesota Duluth.
UNK has six players with 127 or more kills, 305 by right side Jaden Ferguson, a graduate student from Lincoln, Nebraska, who also leads with 34 aces and is second in blocks with 71, 12 solo.
“An amazing year,” said Squiers, who’s in his 25th year at UNK. “I’m happy for Matt (Buttermore) and his bunch. They had an unbelievable second half of the season. For sure.”
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