Nebraska volleyball continues to roll through the season (despite a brief blip against Purdue), improving to 19-0 with another 2-0 week.
The Huskers are the unanimous No. 1 team in both the AVCA Coaches Poll and the 900 Square Feet Media Poll. They were also the No. 1 team in the Division I Committee’s midseason top-16 reveal on Sunday, though they’re still No. 2 in the RPI behind Pittsburgh.
The weekly Big Ten awards haul continued as well as, for the fourth straight week, a Husker is in the conference’s Player of the Week. This time it was sophomore outside hitter Teraya Sigler, following Harper Murray the week before and Andi Jackson the two weeks before that.
Sigler averaged 3.29 kills per set on .391 hitting and 2.57 digs per set in the wins over Northwestern and the Boilermakers. That included a career-high 15 kills against Purdue and a season-high 12 digs against the Wildcats. She’s now notched at least eight kills and has hit over .350 in six straight matches.
“She’s swinging with no fear,” Coach Dani Busboom Kelly said last week. “She’s communicating at a high level. Just everything she’s doing, it just continues to get better and better each match, and that’s what we need her to do in that position is be able to kill balls. I think she understands that that’s her role, and so she’s going for it.”
Olivia Mauch also earned Big Ten Defensive Player of the Week, the second Husker to do so this season (Manaia Ogbechie). She averaged 4.0 digs per set and anchored a defense that held the Wildcats and Boilermakers to a combined .091 hitting percentage.
“She’s played great,” Busboom Kelly said on the Huskers Radio Network Tuesday night. “She’s steady. We know what you’re going to get. It’s everything you want from a libero. She’s just going to do her job and do it well.”
Busboom Kelly’s one critique is that she’d like to see her junior libero be a bit more vocal and take a bit more court in serve receive. While Busboom Kelly is pleased with the team’s overall passing this season, other passers don’t need to be stepping in front of what she believes is an All-American-level libero.
With a little more than a month still remaining in Big Ten play, six different Huskers have earned weekly awards from the conference, including four who have won Player of the Week (Ogbechie, Jackson twice, Murray and Sigler), two who have won Defensive Player of the Week (Ogbechie and Mauch) and Bergen Reilly, who has won Setter of the Week twice.
The “brief blip” mentioned at the top was the second set against Purdue, a 25-20 loss that snapped Nebraska’s streak of consecutive set wins at 26. However, the team’s demeanor didn’t change — even though Busboom Kelly sort of wanted it to.
“I felt like our locker room on Saturday was a little — I hate using this word, but — zen, very calm, and I thought it could have been a little more rambunctious,” Busboom Kelly said. “We were also just really confident we were going to play well and that we were going to win that match, so that’s a really good thing. But a little more fiery spirit, I think, could go a long ways.”
Last week, Busboom Kelly and her players talked about the benefits the Big Ten schedule provides in terms of time to train hard early in the week. Busboom Kelly said her plan was to pull back on that a bit this weekend as the Huskers prepare to host the league’s California schools on Thursday and Saturday.
Nebraska celebrates a block during a college volleyball match against Purdue Saturday, Oct. 17, 2026, in Lincoln, Nebraska. Photo by Jackson D. Luethje.
“We’ll obviously do our prep for UCLA and USC, but we went pretty hard the last two weeks early in the week and you kind of want to balance that out,” Busboom Kelly said. “Also with the weather changing, school’s getting tougher, you’ve got those midterms — I think it’s a good week to make sure we get our work done but not a week that we have to push really hard.”
Nebraska will first face UCLA, the lone Big Ten team to take a set off the Huskers in 2025 when Nebraska visited Pauley Pavilion on Nov. 14.
“I remember they played great, and we had a lot of Husker fans there, so it was a really fun match,” Busboom Kelly said of that match, a 3-1 victory. “They had Maggie Li, a returning outside hitter, I think she’s a great player; I played against her when she was at Cal. She’s just smart and is hard to stop because she has all the shots. She does a really nice job. And then [Marianna] Singletary, I thought, was a force in the middle, and their libero played great last year against us.”
This year’s Bruins are 15-4 overall and 6-2 in Big Ten play. They’re sitting just outside the top 25, earning enough votes to slot in at 27th. However, the Division I Committee has more respect for the Bruins’ body of work as they came in 13th in the midseason seed reveal. They’ve needed five sets to beat the likes of Hawaii, Maryland and Ohio State and they dropped their first three matches against ranked opponents, but the beat Penn State in five last week.
Li, a 6-foot-3 senior, is leading the UCLA attack with 3.30 kills per set on .260 hitting. The Bruins rank third in the Big Ten in blocks at 2.73 per set, thanks largely to Singletary, the 6-foot-4 fifth-year middle blocker who began her career at Texas. She’s leading the conference with 1.56 blocks per set while adding 2.55 kills per set on .335 hitting.
The libero Busboom Kelly mentioned is Lola Schumacher, who led the Big Ten in digs per set last season (4.36). However, the junior suffered an injury against Maryland on Oct. 9 and hasn’t played since, missing the Bruins’ last three matches.
“We’re going to work a lot on our offense and how to kind of avoid Singletary,” Busboom Kelly said of the team’s approach heading into Thursday’s match. “We don’t want to ever avoid anybody, but we want to be conscious of the opponent’s strengths, so we want to make sure out middles are running different routes and making sure they’re available, but it’s the usual stuff — serve and pass and be aggressive.”
First serve against the Bruins on Thursday is set for 6 p.m. CT on FS1 with Kelsie Kasper and Anna Connelly on the call. John Baylor and Lauren (Cook) West will also call the match on the Huskers Radio Network.
Nebraska will then return to the Devaeny Center on Saturday to host the Trojans for the Huskers’ final home match until a three-match stretch to close out the regular season. They’ll spend the next two weeks away from home.
