Andi Jackson has added more accolades to her already extensive list after another standout week for No. 1 Nebraska volleyball.
The Big Ten named the senior middle blocker its player of the week on Monday, the second such honor of her career, then the AVCA awarded her national player of the week Tuesday. She recorded two matches with double-digit kills on over .600 hitting during a 3-0 week for the 13-0 Huskers, averaging 3.33 kills per set on .578 hitting and 1.56 blocks per set overall.
The Brighton, Colo., native is putting up the best attacking efficiency and blocking numbers of her career, and her head coach said she’s been more impressed with the mental strides Jackson’s made than anything she’s done from a technical standpoint.
“She’s always been a great player, and statistically, blocking, she’s doing much better,” Coach Dani Busboom Kelly said. “But just the way she’s leading and playing with joy, and, I think, letting mistakes bounce off her a little bit easier and quicker than she used to, I think those are probably the biggest changes. Just more her mental game and how she’s playing, not kills or blocks.”
That being said, her swings are still pretty spectacular. Ask someone charged with trying to dig her shots every day in practice.
“It’s harder than you think it is, and you might think it’s hard, but it’s harder than that,” libero Olivia Mauch said. “She’s just so good at moving the balls and hitting different shots every time, so it makes it really hard to read her, and she just hits the ball so hard.”
Jackson led Nebraska with 10 kills on .667 hitting and tied her season high with six blocks against Missouri on Wednesday, and it was the latter number she was most proud of after putting an emphasis on that part of her game during the offseason.
“It’s definitely rewarding, but I feel like I still have so much improvement to make, so I don’t want to get caught up in the stats game and, ‘Oh, I had six box this game,’ and then kind of get complacent from there, because I know that, like I said, there’s still a lot of room for improvement,” Jackson said after the match. “But it is nice to see it come to fruition a little bit in these games, and hopefully continue to do that.”
Andi Jackson swings over two Rutgers blockers for one of her 14 kills. Photo by Braden Cochran.
Jackson followed that with a season-high 14 kills on .632 hitting and four blocks against Rutgers on Friday. She ended the week with six kills on .364 hitting and four blocks against Ohio State.
Jackson has stepped her already impressive game up another level over the past couple weeks, tallying double-digit kills in three of her last five and hitting over .500 in five of her last seven as her connection with setter Bergen Reilly continues to evolve with each passing day.
“We work on it pretty much every day in practice,” Reilly said. “While the passers are warming up, setters and middles go and work together. Obviously, it’s been four years of putting in work together, but it’s just super cool to see how, even though we’ve been working together for four plus years, there’s still new things that we both learn about each other and things that we learn to kind of expand the middles’ range.”
The 2025 AVCA Middle Blocker of the Year led the nation with a .467 attack percentage, good for third on the program’s single-season records list, while averaging 2.74 kills and 1.12 blocks per set and serving 16 aces. Through 13 matches as a senior, she’s hitting a blistering .490, good for third in the nation, while averaging 2.56 kills and 1.28 blocks per set and serving 11 aces. Her career .442 hitting percentage has always separated her from other prominent middles, and she’s taken that to another level this season.
“I think it’s really special when you consider how much we use her,” Busboom Kelly said of Jackson’s attack percentage. “Middles typically do have high hitting percentages, but we force the ball to Andi from all over, and no matter where Bergen’s at, we try to find Andi the ball. It’s almost equivalent of an opposite getting set.
“Andi gets set high balls now out of system, so she’s doing a lot for us that middles in other programs aren’t necessarily asked to do. So for her to continue to be that efficient and keep getting better at those things, just hats off to her because she could be the type of player that gets a little complacent, and she’s not whatsoever.”
While the outside hitters get the majority of out-of-system balls, Reilly said she’s comforted setting Jackson from anywhere on the court as her attacking arsenal has continued to expand, making Nebraska’s offense (second in the country hitting .319) that much more potent and unpredictable.
“It’s super freeing, just knowing all of our middles have been working really hard to be able to hit right side balls just in transition,” Reilly said. “If it’s not really a great position for me to set a slide, then they just call a jet, and it’s been a really nice new wrinkle to have. Out of system, you see them always transitioning. They’ve all been putting in a lot of work to make sure that that can be a part of our offense, and I think that that’s also helped open things up for the outsides if we are out of system.”
Jackson is the second Husker to win Big Ten Player of the Week this season — and the second middle. Manaia Ogbechie earned the honor on Sept. 13. The sophomore is averaging 2.24 kills per set on .438 hitting, and fellow second-year Husker Kenna Cogill is 1.67 kills per set on .414 hitting when called upon. That kind of production goes beyond just the middle blockers themselves, though the degree to which they’re taking advantage of their opportunities is remarkable.
Andi Jackson (15) blocks the ball against Creighton middle blocker Ayden Ames (9). Photo by John S. Peterson.
“Our middle group is the best in the country, and Dani said that, everyone said that, and they show it, and the stats show it, just in the way that they’re playing and their effect on the court,” Reilly said. “Even when they’re not getting set, they’re holding blocks for the pins or whatever, they’re getting touches even if they’re not getting stuff blocks.
“But it also comes back to passing. We can’t set our middles if we don’t have a pass, and it really is just a whole team effort to be able to get the middles going. That’s been just really cool to see how we’ve been putting it all together. They’re tough to stop, but they also push each other in practice, and even when they’re playing against each other, they all know each other’s tendencies pretty well, so they have to kind of work against their tendency to try and score in practice, and I think that’s made all of them a lot better.”
“Banner, not a name” was one of the mottos the team adopted when Busboom Kelly took over last season, and Jackson is one of the many players who embody that philosophy of team over self. Because of her natural gifts, the coaches continue to ask more and more of her, and she has embraced every new challenge thrown her way.
“Andi will never back down from anything you ask her to do, which is pretty special,” Busboom Kelly said. “She’s not going to say, ‘Oh, that’s not my position,’ or ‘I can’t do that,’ or ‘I don’t want to try that because I might fail.’ She’s going to go for it and not worry about her stats or her production. It’s like, ‘If this is what’s going to help the team and it’s going to help me, I might take some lumps early.’ I think that’s pretty rare because a player of that caliber could definitely be worried about themselves.
“She’s pretty special in that way, but also just her athleticism, and it’s just her quickness, I think, is so, so unique off the ground. She’s so fast off the ground, you just can’t prepare for that as an opponent unless you’re just only going to worry about Andi. And then we all know what happens in the sport of volleyball if you’re worried about one player, then you get exposed so many other ways.”
Jackson will look to continue challenging herself as the Huskers hit the road for week two of Big Ten play with visits to No. 16 Penn State and Maryland on the docket.
