Male coaches dominate NCAA volleyball, but Dani Busboom Kelly can shatter glass ceiling

When it comes time to hand out the trophies, women’s volleyball is a men’s club.

The 40 NCAA Division I tournaments played to date have all been won by male coaches, typically in title matches against other male coaches. Though women-run roughly 47% of Division I programs – and did when the NCAA counted head coaching heads more than a decade ago – a gender gap endures at the elite level of the sport.

Unbeaten, top-ranked and top-seeded, Louisville coach Dani Busboom Kelly has an excellent chance to shatter that glass ceiling. And is regularly reminded that it’s about time.

“I hate to think of it as a gender thing, but it is true that (as) female coaches we’re always pulling for each other,” she said. “You hear a lot of female coaches say, ‘We need a female to win, a woman to win this year and when are we going to have a woman coach win the national championship?’...

“That’s always been a goal to be the first female to win a national championship. To actually be in a position where that could come true is exciting.”

More: No. 1 Louisville volleyball unimpressed by its unbeaten regular season

With a record of 28-0, achieved with only 11 lost sets, Louisville will open the NCAA tournament Friday night against Illinois-Chicago as a strong favorite to host a regional final next week at Freedom Hall and to eventually advance to volleyball’s final four Dec. 16 and 18 in Columbus, Ohio.

Women coaches have made it that far before. Florida’s Mary Wise twice reached the NCAA Championship match, in 2003 and 2017, before losing four-set matches to USC and Nebraska. Brigham Young’s Heather Olmstead was an assistant to her brother Shawn when the Cougars lost the 2014 title match to Penn State, then returned to the final four as BYU’s head coach in 2018.

But while four different female coaches have won the last four NCAA Women’s Basketball titles and women coaches have claimed the last five NCAA Softball crowns, women’s volleyball is still waiting on its big breakthrough.

What once seemed a curiosity is starting to look more like a curse.

“Starting families seems to be a big thing and the time commitment that coaching takes,” Busboom Kelly said when asked about barriers. “But you don’t see that excuse said in the last five years. It just seems like that’s a thing of the past. . .

“Our sport is shifting a little bit. There’s more and more female head coaches probably in the last four or five years that have gotten good Power Five (conference) jobs. I feel like (a female coach champion) is coming right around the corner, even if it doesn’t happen this year.”

More: Louisville volleyball gets No. 1 seed, Kentucky and WKU also dancing in NCAA tournament

According to the NCAA’s Demographics Database, 160 of the 340 Division I head coaches were women in 2020. Seven of the top 25 teams in the most recent American Volleyball Coaches Association poll have female head coaches.

Of those, Louisville is the most likely NCAA champion. At the risk of wandering into the weeds, only Texas has a better hitting percentage than U of L among Power Five programs, and no Power Five school’s opponents have hit at a lower rate than Louisville’s. (Volleyball hitting percentage is determined by subtracting errors from kills and then dividing the difference by total attacks.)

Suffice it to say, it’s a significant statistic at which the Cardinals excel. Though it guarantees nothing, it does provide a revealing glimpse of relative strength.

“Even when we had that nice run in the preseason, I kept telling myself that these teams have a little less experience and we returned everybody, so we were expected to be better right off the bat,” Busboom Kelly said. ”So it still kind of feels like we have work to do and room to grow."

A woman's work is never done if she coaches Division I volleyball. Not yet, anyway.

Tim Sullivan: 502-582-4650, tsullivan@courier-journal.com; Twitter: @TimSullivan714

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Louisville volleyball coach seeks to shatter NCAA glass ceiling