Preseason practice is flying by for No. 1 Nebraska volleyball.
With less than a week and a half until the Huskers take the court at the First Serve Showcase to open the 2025 season, the team still has plenty of work to do.
However, the early Red-White Scrimmage and Saturday’s Alumni Match served as natural breaks in the dog days of camp and have helped the team continue to push forward.
“I felt like fall camp was going to go by really slow for me; I don’t know why, just starting out, I thought it was going to go by super slow,” Harper Murray said on Wednesday. “But it’s not, it’s gone by super fast, and I’m really excited. I think the Red-white and Alumni Match and scrimmaging at practice every day helps, because we get into playing and you feel like you’re really close. The alumni match will be fun, because I feel like right after that is when it’s really going to hit that we have a game a few days later. So it’s gone by fast for most of us, I think, but two-a-days are hard, they’re really hard, but we get through it together. So it’s been cool.”
The amount of six-on-six the team plays in practices has also kept things from getting too monotonous in practice. That’s a change from the way John Cook ran his practices, and Murray said she’s seen some of the benefits under Dani Busboom Kelly.
“I feel like we’re a super competitive team, and we have a lot of girls this year,” Murray said. “This is one of the biggest rosters I’ve ever been a part of, so we have the numbers to scrimmage every day, and John didn’t scrimmage as much as Dani. I know Dani likes to play a lot, and it’s been fun just learning and seeing how we all work together. You want to scrimmage, because you want to see what lineups go well, who passes next to each other well, who can block together. So I think it’s smart on Dani’s part to have us play as much as we do, just because we get to see and feel out our lineups and feel who we play next to.”
The increased scrimmaging is possible in part because of the 17-player roster. The Huskers can compete regularly without fear of wearing down, but it’s also going to make for some difficult decisions for Busboom Kelly and her staff when the season-opener rolls around. Coming out of the Red-White, the head coach said she didn’t necessarily see any potential starters run away with a job based on their performance. However, while not everyone can play in a given match, she sees the depth as a long-term advantage for the team.
“The depth is pretty amazing,” Busboom Kelly said. “Our practices are really tough. That’s just going to make us stronger in the end. That’s why I’m very excited to play against somebody else, even if it’s alum, this weekend, to really see how our eight players can perform together, seven or eight, without playing against each other, because it’s very hard to tell how good we are, how good one individual is, because the line is so thin between maybe our top outside and our fourth outside; it’s razor thin.
“So against somebody else, we’ll get to use that depth, get creative with our lineups, and I think that is just so important when you’re talking about the longevity of a season and being our best in December, wear and tear, team morale, all that’s really important to have a deep team.”
Busboom Kelly highlighted serve and pass as a key area she planned to focus more on in practice this week based on what she saw in the Red-White, though she admitted it’s hard to know what to make of a scrimmage like that where the team is playing against itself in front of fans for the first time since the spring. On Wednesday, she said she likes what she’s seen on the practice court.
“I thought just the last couple days, we played a lot cleaner, so I’m chalking some of that up to nerves, but definitely we want to be one of the best serving and passing teams in the country,” Busboom Kelly said. “Nebraska always is. This team is no different, so we want to continue to fine tune that, and that’s a pretty big priority going into the First Serve Showcase.”
Other Notes:
>> Busboom Kelly said that although they haven’t graded out everything in practice so far this camp, Laney Choboy and Virginia Adriano have stood out to her from the service line. Adriano notched a match-high three aces in the Red-White Scrimmage on Saturday while Choboy recorded 14 aces as a part-time server as a freshman, though she didn’t serve last season.
>> Busboom Kelly offered her assessment of the setting from Bergen Reilly and Campbell Flynn in practice and in public. She introduced a faster tempo on offense when she took over in Lincoln, and the setters and hitters are still working on fine-tuning their connections.
“I think the setters have a lot of work to do,” Busboom Kelly said. “We’re setting the middle great. I think our tempo needs to smoothen out a little bit, and we’ve got to get a little bit more consistent behind to our right sides and our slides. But you have to remember the Red-White was a whole week earlier than it’s ever been, so we’ve only been practicing for — we had six days, five days of practice. So that’ll come, and I’m not worried about that. The thing is they’re playing confident. We already talked about their well-rounded games. Campbell’s improved a ton from a defensive standpoint.
“A lot of those things that you can’t really work on every day to get better at were great. It’s the location and some of the tempo that we’re going to continue to work on that’ll just get better and better the more we play together and the more we settle into a lineup.”
>> Murray said her blocking is something she’s been focusing on throughout the offseason, and she was proud of her performance in that area in the Red-White Scrimmage. She finished with three stuffs on the stat sheet, though that isn’t always an accurate representation of blocking prowess.
“I feel like blocking is one of the hardest things to adjust to adjust to when you get to college, and I feel like my freshman and sophomore year, I was never a great blocker, but as we get to a higher level and as I’m going into my upperclassman season, I really want to make sure that’s something that I improve on,” Murray said. “It can be moments of the game that change points and that give you an advantage, so I want to just make sure that I’m keeping it consistent.”
