New territory: Breaking down 2024 18-team Big Ten volleyball schedule

Two of the new members of the Big Ten conference go from the frying pan into the fire for their first Big Ten volleyball road trips.

USC and UCLA will play their respective first league road matches at Nebraska during the last week of September to kick off the 10-week conference schedule. Those two Southern California schools and two from the Pacific Northwest, Washington and Oregon, not only expanded the league to 18 teams but created a whole new set of travels situations to work out.

Second-year UCLA coach Alfee Reft said they worked with Big Ten officials to make the integration seamless and all the cross-country flights more manageable. He’s looking forward to the challenge of opening conference play in Lincoln, where Nebraska is not only the defending B1G champion but NCAA attendance leader, 

“I think opening up anywhere in the Big Ten for us is going to be exciting,” Reft said during an interview on the Big Ten Network. “Certainly, heading out to Nebraska is a real fun way for our Bruin squad this year to enter and have our inaugural match in the Big Ten.”

While the Huskers will host the West Coast teams during the first week of league play, the four other Big Ten 2023 NCAA tournament qualifiers will face off on opening night as Penn State goes to Purdue and Wisconsin plays at Minnesota.

Adding the four West Coast members created new challenges for the Big Ten in which every team will play 20 matches. All 18 teams will play the other 17 at least once.

Grace McNamara, the Big Ten’s senior director of television administration, said the conference worked with several partners, including faculty-athletic representatives, the athletic medicine cabinet and senior women’s administrators, to create the schedule.

Each team will play three others in a home-and-home series. The remaining 14 opponents were split into seven single home plays and seven away matches. McNamara said they considered travel, competitive balance and historic rivalries to determine which three teams would be double plays. The conference will reevaluate the groupings after the season and could adjust them next year.

“The opponent rotation can, in some ways, be more challenging than the schedule itself,” McNamara said. “Because so much of your outcome on the season is impacted by who you’re playing.”

Programs have long known who they would play as the Big Ten released the opponent list in February. McNamara said they wanted to get the matchups out to teams earlier than usual to allow them to begin making plans for travel and nonconference opponents and better grasp a possible budget.

Yet even after the opponent list was announced, the work was far from over. The Big Ten utilized long-time partner Kevin Pauga, a Michigan State associate athletic director who runs the scheduling consulting company Faktor. They had meetings with each school to gather blackout dates, which are complicated in November when men’s and women’s basketball teams also compete for arena space for six institutions.

In addition, the league waits for the football schedule to be set in late May to make more tweaks. They try to balance building audiences and using large football audiences on the Big Ten Network to provide a lead-in for volleyball matches.

When creating the 2024 schedule, league officials established six parameters:

• A maximum of four split weekends per institution
• A minimum of two travel-efficient away-away trips per institution
• Minimum two matches before playing a team a second time
• All Central and Eastern Time Zone schools go west one time for two matches
• All Pacific Time Zone schools go east four times to play seven matches
• Limited instances of four consecutive home and road matches

McNamara said it is a relief to get the schedules out, but the work isn’t over yet.

“This is really, truly months and months and months of work hours and weeks, so it’s great to get it out.,” McNamara said. “Once you send it out, we might have to move something here or there. That’s very typical and what we do in all of our schedules so we’re kind of working through some of those lingering items. A lot of the schedule is dotted with television input, but those schedules are not finalized by any means.”

The biggest unknown of the new schedule was the increased travel with the inclusion of the four West Coast teams.

Despite the focus on long trips, USC coach Brad Keller said he knew it would be part of the deal with joining the Big Ten. He’s spent a lot of time this spring planning how to handle the transition. He’s also become an expert on sleep science. He’s tried to learn the proper schedules to help his team acclimate to different time zones and reach peak athletic performance.

“I wasn’t really shocked or worried or whatever. The schedule is gonna be tough no matter what,” Keller said. “I just got into a mindset of I don’t care. We’re going to show up and play whoever. We’re USC. We need to be good, and we’re going to try to do the best we can to get good. We’re going to show up whoever we need to go and play where we need to play.”

USC will make four trips east this season. After that single match to Nebraska, the Trojans will go coast to coast in mid-October to play Rutgers and Maryland. November features a road trip to Illinois and Indiana, two home matches and then another Midwest flight for weekend matches against Northwestern and Purdue.

To help the transition, the Trojans will have two options for practice times so they can acclimate for the matches they play in the Eastern Time Zone and others on the West Coast. Also, USC flew commercial in the Pac-12, but the Trojans will charter flights this year.

Keller also tried to schedule as many home non-conference matches as possible to allow the players to acclimate to the start of the academic school year. USC opens with back-to-back matches at Pepperdine in nearby Malibu, goes to Omaha for matches against Creighton and Kansas State, and then comes home for seven matches before opening Big Ten play at home against Ohio State. Take note that Ohio State goes West to open its B1G slate.

“It’s new territory,” he said. “It’s the best conference in America by far, and it’s not even close.”

UCLA has the same road trips as its crosstown rival, but in a different order. Oregon and Washington have their single road match in November to Minnesota, the closest Big Ten school to their campuses. The Northwest schools will make weekend trips to Wisconsin/Iowa, Penn State/Ohio State and the Michigan schools.

The challenging travel isn’t limited to the teams flying east. Wisconsin, the Big Ten champ from 2019-22, faces a tough November. After traveling to California to take on USC and UCLA, the Badgers host rival Minnesota before going to Nebraska.

Michigan State, Rutgers and Nebraska are the only schools with four straight conference road matches. Michigan begins league play at Michigan, Penn State, Indiana and Purdue. Rutgers travels to Purdue, Ohio State, Northwestern and Illinois during the eighth and ninth weeks. The Huskers start November by going to Wisconsin, Northwestern, Oregon, and Washington.

Big Ten teams are also playing more Thursday matches this year. 

Every week features at least one Thursday match, while three weeks in November have three or four league matches. McNamara said television could be a factor in that increase. (The Big Ten television schedules will be released in early August.)

Iowa and Purdue will be the last teams to make their West Coast road trip, during the last week of the regular season, with Purdue going to the Northwest and Iowa visiting Los Angeles.

Purdue coach Dave Shondell said other than perhaps wanting a little revenge after the Ducks ended their season in 2023, they would treat those matches just like any other — despite the extended flights.

“I don’t think that trip is going to be any more challenging than any other trip we take,” he said.

Shondell said the logistics will be left up to their director of operations, including where to have a Thanksgiving meal that week. The Boilermakers will play Wednesday-Friday during the final week and Shondell said he was grateful to wrap the season up on Friday and get an extra day to rest up for the postseason.

The only two matches on the last day of the regular season are Nebraska at Maryland and Michigan State at Wisconsin. McNamara said moving matches to Friday during the schedule’s final week was based on coaches’ feedback and will provide an extra day off before many of them gather to watch the NCAA tournament selection show.

Despite the late trip out West, Shondell approves the new schedule.

“I think the Big Ten did a great job,” he said. “They’re certainly treating our sport with great respect right now. 

“We’ve got an opportunity at a time when every (Autonomous Four Conference) needs to make as much money as they can to survive. Volleyball could very easily go from a program that drains money to one that can make money.”

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