From ESPN.com:
FOR GENERATIONS, NEBRASKANS have boasted that on football Saturdays, Memorial Stadium becomes the third-largest city in the state. On Wednesday, the place will become volleyball city. More than 91,000 people are expected to fill the stadium to watch two matches, potentially setting a record for the most-attended women's sporting event in the world. The record, 91,648, was set in March 2022 at a UEFA Women's Champions League match in Barcelona.
The event is so momentous that Nebraska's chancellor canceled school for the day and the board of regents gave the OK to sell beer. (Alcoholic beverages are not allowed at football games.)
"I don't know how to properly define just how big this is," Nebraska athletic director Trev Alberts said last week. "Unless [the football team is] undefeated when we play Michigan in Week 5, I don't know of anything that's going to be bigger."
Seven months of planning, every day, has gone into this, with staging meetings from police, fire, rescue and traffic to concessions, the band and marketing. Lindsay Peterson, the director of volleyball operations at Nebraska, said weather monitoring started about 10 days out because it's too unpredictable in the Midwest -- especially with the heat index, which topped 115 degrees in Lincoln most of last week. Nobody wants to even talk about what could happen if light rain hits the Taraflex court built on a stage near the north end zone. The most recent forecast calls for sunny skies, a high of 82 and winds of 10 mph.
The impetus for this whole production? A rivalry, of course. Last September, nearly 500 miles away in Madison, Wisconsin, the Badgers -- Nebraska's biggest nemesis and the team that beat it in the 2021 national championship -- moved a match to the Kohl Center and drew a crowd of 16,833, breaking Nebraska's attendance record for a regular-season match.
