Fans packed Center Grove’s gym last Friday for an exhibition volleyball match between Purdue and Indiana University.
Chris Williams | For the Daily Journal
By the time the gym doors were opened to the public, the line stretched through the corridor and outside. Half the waiting fans clad in Indiana Hoosier crimson, the other half in Purdue black and gold.
No, this wasn’t a men’s basketball game at Assembly Hall or Mackey Arena. This was a spring volleyball match. An exhibition. In the words of Allen Iverson, we’re talkin’ about practice. Not a game. We talkin’ about practice.
And yet Center Grove’s gym was as full last Friday evening as it has been anytime in the last decade or two, some 4,000 or so fans eagerly cheering on some of the best college volleyball players in the country. Dozens upon dozens of young girls, many of them aspiring young volleyballers themselves, looked on in awe during the match and then stuck around to chase autographs afterward.
If you needed any more proof that women’s sports are having a moment, here you go.
The past year or so in general, and the last few weeks in particular, have felt transformative in terms of how America views female athletes. Record television audiences have tuned in for women’s college basketball games, with South Carolina’s victory over Iowa in the NCAA championship game ranking as the most watched basketball broadcast — men’s or women’s, college or pro — in the last five years. Last week’s WNBA draft shattered viewership marks, drawing millions of eyeballs, and a reported 6,000 or so fans turned out to Gainbridge Fieldhouse for the Indiana Fever’s draft party, cheering the local squad’s selection of Caitlin Clark with the first pick.
Clark’s arrival in Indy has brought a surge in ticket sales — and prices! — and a never-before-seen amount of media attention on the Fever (complete with a cringeworthy moment at her introductory press conference). Heck, one of the young ball girls at Friday’s volleyball match opted to wear a Clark T-shirt instead of her Indy South club jersey.
And while Clark — along with other rising stars such as Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers — have been in the spotlight of late, the rise in viewership of women’s athletics hasn’t been limited to just basketball. The NCAA volleyball championship set new attendance and viewership records, with 19,598 fans watching in person and an average of 1.7 million more watching on TV (despite the title match being up against NFL games on a Sunday). Softball viewership for the Women’s College World Series has been in that same neighborhood for the last couple of years.
There’s never been a better time to be a young female athlete, especially around here. Not only do the Fever boast a star pairing with Clark and 2023 WNBA Rookie of the Year Aliyah Boston, but the newly formed Pro Volleyball Federation is adding Indy Ignite as an expansion team. The Ignite will begin playing out of the Fishers Event Center in 2025.
Indiana volleyball coach Steve Aird was an assistant for four consecutive national championship teams at Penn State from 2007 to 2010, and he says none of those squads were getting the same level of attention that today’s players are getting.
“I’ve been involved in women’s athletics for 20-plus years,” Aird said. “There’s been special athletes and great teams and great performances. I’m proud that it’s getting more attention, certainly, in this state; with incredible athletes like Caitlin coming in and the microscope kind of magnifying everything 100x, hopefully that’ll keep pushing it.”
Center Grove volleyball coach Jennifer Hawk, who played at the University of Michigan two decades ago, has enjoyed seeing support for her sport grow since her playing days ended. Increased television exposure, she believes, has provided a major boost.
“You can watch it all the time,” she said. “People in years past were just not real educated on the sport, so they didn’t really know how to watch it or where or, ‘I’m not going to that — it’s volleyball.’ They just didn’t grasp it. But now it’s everywhere. I remember we were excited to be on TV once in college. Big Ten Network was so little, and now it’s just booming. I think it’s just really taking off because it is fun to watch.”
“Volleyball has had this steady development,” longtime Purdue coach Dave Shondell added, “and in the last couple of years it’s just blown up.”
Friday’s match was part of Purdue’s annual goodwill tour of Indiana high schools, with the Boilermakers having already played Louisville at Hamilton Southeastern and Wisconsin at Lake Central. The Hoosiers also played a match against Xavier at Westfield.
The Boilermakers first played a spring match in a high school gym six years ago, taking on Kentucky at perennial powerhouse Providence, and they’ve gradually added more dates since the pandemic subsided. Hawk reached out to Shondell last year about having Center Grove host one — and when it came together, the timing seemed serendipitous.
A Purdue-Indiana rivalry match, with women’s college volleyball at its peak, during the same week that Clark’s arrival made Indianapolis the center of the sporting universe? Suffice to say that tickets didn’t go unclaimed for very long.
This month has brought two once-in-a-lifetime moments to the area. The solar eclipse two weeks ago was one of them. The other is this current watershed moment in the evolution of women’s sports. Clark has become the avatar for it all, but it’s been a work in progress for quite some time — and it’s been long, long overdue.
“It’s so exciting,” Center Grove assistant athletic director Katie Fisher said before Friday’s match. “I think that women’s sports have always deserved this, so to see them get the recognition and support is just amazing. From soccer to softball to volleyball, basketball, all these athletes are so talented, and that they get to show what they can do and what they’re made of is really important.”
Reese Dunkle is one of those athletes. The Center Grove junior will be heading off to play major college volleyball a little over a year from now, and she’s excited to know that she’ll get the chance to play in front of capacity crowds like Friday’s on a regular basis.
“I think it’s great to see all this support for women’s sports — especially seeing our gym that we play in full,” Dunkle said. “It’s really important for the game. And I think that Caitlin Clark coming is definitely drawing attention to, ‘women’s sports is interesting and it’s fun to watch,’ and I hope that that impacts people.”
Seems like it’s already started to.
As Shondell noted, there have always been hot spots in various sports — North Carolina women’s soccer in the 1990s, UConn women’s basketball and Penn State volleyball earlier this century. I can remember about 15 years ago when Skylar Diggins signed on to play basketball at Notre Dame, and Muffet McGraw’s teams were regularly outdrawing the men in South Bend.
But now it feels more universal. The increase in exposure through television and social media has helped spread the talent around, and women’s college sports aren’t always being dominated by one or two schools. Young athletes — including the ones who stuck around to get autographs from stars such as Purdue’s Chloe Chicoine — can watch their role models compete almost every night, whether on national television or on a webcast, and there are more role models to choose from than ever before.
“I hope they really grasp this opportunity,” Hawk said, “really kind of run with it and be like, ‘Wow, I’m going to be that.’ We’ve heard a lot about Caitlin Clark’s to-do list in second grade, and so I’m hoping to kind of put a little bit of a bug in their minds to take it further.”
Female athletes — from Cheryl Miller to Mia Hamm to Katie Ledecky and now Clark — have been taking it further for decades. They’re just getting more attention for it now.
A lot more. Heck, exhibition volleyball matches — practices — are drawing sellout crowds.
It’s about damn time.
Ryan O’Leary is the sports editor for the Daily Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].
