Choboy Makes First Starts at Libero for No. 1 Nebraska Volleyball, But Competition Continues

The libero position has a storied history in the Nebraska volleyball program. Lexi Rodriguez, Kenzie Maloney and Justine Wong-Orantes have all earned All-America honors at the position over the past decade.

Junior Laney Choboy joined those ranks over the weekend as she made her first starts in the libero jersey during the AVCA First Serve, helping the No. 1 Huskers go 2-0 against top-10 competition.

“I think it’s a huge deal,” said Choboy, who earned the start after a close battle with sophomore Olivia Mauch during the offseason. “Obviously, Nebraska has a legacy of liberos and big-time liberos too — Justine and Lexi going to play in the Olympics and trying to make the Olympic team. It’s insane to think that I’m in this position now, but I’m just going to continue to have gratitude for this position and be thankful that I’m here and then continue to work and hopefully carry on those legacies.”

The 5-foot-3 Choboy stepped into some massive shoes last Friday, donning the libero jersey last worn by Rodriguez, a four-time All-American and 2024 AVCA Player of the Year finalist. However, she said she’s tried not to think of it in terms of replacing the program legend she spent two years playing alongside.

“It would be hard if I was to think like that,” Choboy said. “How I’m kind of going into it is I learned from Lexi, and I’m going to continue to use her as a resource of mine, but also, I am my own player, and I can do this, and while I am stepping into the role that she left behind, I am coming into it on my own as well.”

Choboy was considered the top libero in the 2023 class coming out of Leesville Road in Raleigh, North Carolina. She earned “Best Receiver” for the USA Volleyball U19 team at the 2022 Pan American Cup as the Americans took gold.

Choboy flipped her commitment from Minnesota to Nebraska after a coaching change in Minneapolis, and Rodriguez had the libero position locked up when she arrived in Lincoln. After biding her time for two seasons, Choboy called the opportunity to move back to her natural position “amazing.”

“I’ve had a lot of support from my teammates, which has been really, really helpful, and I don’t think I would have made it here without them,” Choboy said. “Last two years, I kind of asked for flowers a lot, but I got rain, and I think when you really take a step back to realize what this means, flowers need rain to grow. I think that through all the storms and the rain that I’ve been through my first years, and it hasn’t all been bad, but I think that now I’m finally starting to grow and come into this new position with a lot of gratitude for just everything that I’ve been through and all my teammates that have supported me along the way.”

Choboy was a defensive highlight waiting to happen the moment she stepped on the court as a freshman, and she’s improved her passing a great deal over the past two years. However, Choboy said her mental game is where she’s improved the most during her time in Lincoln.

“Some people will say like, ‘Oh, you’ve improved so much,’ and I think that it wasn’t really my skill that I improved in necessarily,” Choboy said. “It was more my mentality and just how I was going to go about things and what I was going to let affect me, what I was going to let into my body and my heart, and how I was going to play rather than me working on the technical side, which obviously I did, too, but I think the mental side was a huge difference for me.”

Choboy’s fiery personality has always been on full display on the court, and Coach Dani Busboom Kelly said her presence was ultimately the deciding factor in a competition with two nearly equally matched talents.

“It’s not really one thing way outweighs the other with Olivia and Laney in particular, because they’re both just so talented,” Busboom Kelly said. “It’s more maybe a little comfort level from the team. It’s, again, razor thin. I thought Olivia played amazing this weekend. I thought Laney had a great weekend too. It’s tough, but like I’ve been saying, we’re going to need them both to play huge, huge roles this year, and just because Laney was libero this weekend, she’s going to have to work really hard to keep that jersey.”

Choboy learned she had won the battle — at least for the first weekend — in somewhat of an anticlimactic way. Busboom Kelly gave Choboy the start but split playing time in the libero jersey equally between the two during the Alumni Match. Ahead of the next practice to begin preparing for the opener, Busboom Kelly had the same lineup on the board.

“It wasn’t anything magical or big or anything like that,” Choboy said. “She was just kind of like, ‘OK, go to rotation one,’ and we were like, ‘OK.’ … I was really excited, obviously, but I knew that I kind of just had to do my job, and that it is just a position at the end of the day and what I give to my team is more important and how can I bring assets to the team that we need, whether it’s energy or defense or anything, serve receive, I don’t know. I was kind of just like, ‘All right, I’m the libero, but next, we’ve got to move on and see what we can do for the team.’”

Choboy posted a match-high 16 digs and helped hold No. 3 Pittsburgh to .111 hitting in her first start, a 3-1 Husker win. She followed with 12 digs in a sweep against No. 6 Stanford as Nebraska held the Cardinal to .094.

“The first 10 points against Pitt, I thought she set the tone,” Busboom Kelly said. “She dug [2024 AVCA National Player of the Year Olivia] Babcock down the line; we knew we were going to give her a lot of line to hit, and Laney stepped up and made some huge plays, and that just gave our team so much confidence going forward in that match. So that was huge, and I think she just played solidly and did what we needed her to do.”

Choboy said she made sure to take a moment to absorb the environment at the sold-out Pinnacle Bank Arena during the Pitt match, stamping her first start in her memory.

“My family came down; they don’t get to see very many games, so it was really fun to see them and just take in all of that,” Choboy said. “My mom and I actually ended up crying after the Pitt game just because it was like, ‘Mom, I did it, I made it past all of the hurdles that I’ve had to so far.”

Though she’s spent the past two years playing right back as a defensive specialist, Choboy said the transition back to libero hasn’t been too difficult as the old skills have come back to her quickly.

“I played left back my whole life, so it’s kind of just getting back into the feel of that,” Choboy said. “But coming in freshman year and sophomore year, I had never played right back a day in my life, so I had to adjust to that as well and I ended up really loving right back for some reason. I don’t know, but I thought it was really, really fun.”

Now Mauch, the sophomore out of Bennington, is filling that right back role, DSing for the opposite hitter. She totaled eight digs and an ace against Pitt and matched Choboy with 12 digs against Stanford.

“I think she’s doing amazing,” Choboy said of Mauch. “It’s actually really hard to go to right back if you’ve never played it. It takes a lot to adjust to it, but I think Liv did a really freaking good job this past weekend at right back. She dug a lot of balls and obviously her serve receive is solid, so I was really proud of her this weekend.”

Though Choboy wore the libero jersey during the first weekend’s matches, the competition is far from over. As Busboom Kelly said, Choboy will have to earn that job every day in practice — and that goes for every position.

“I think it’s going to make them both much better,” Busboom Kelly said. “Each position group should consider themselves as one unit, making each other better every single day. There’s a lot of noise right now — Nebraska is so good, Nebraska does this, blah, blah, blah — but the practices are insanely competitive, so they know that even if they play great in a match that somebody’s going to be on their tail and practice the next day.”