Women’s college volleyball is no longer a niche sport.
Just ask Nebraska.
In 2023, the Cornhuskers packed 92,003 fans into Memorial Stadium for a match against Omaha, breaking the world attendance record for a women’s sporting event. More than 30 Division I volleyball programs set attendance records that season, while 3.6 million fans attended matches nationally. ESPN’s regular-season volleyball audience jumped 58 percent.
The explosion has reached the ACC, too.
Louisville played Penn State in front of more than 21,000 fans in the 2024 national championship. Pitt has developed into a national powerhouse and entered the Women’s Building on Sunday ranked No. 2 in the country.
So here’s an interesting question for Syracuse:
Could any of this happen here?
The Orange certainly aren’t Nebraska or Pitt yet but there’s evidence fans are starting to pay attention.
Syracuse is 5-8 overall and 0-4 in the ACC after Sunday’s 3-0 loss to the Panthers. The Orange’s ACC losing streak has now reached 15 matches.
But something interesting happened Sunday.
813 fans showed up.
That’s more than four times the announced crowd of 201 for Syracuse’s ACC opener against Louisville just nine days earlier.
There were people in the building.
And Syracuse has another potential tool for introducing new fans to its program: social media and freshman Charis Burge.
Before Burge had ever played an ACC match, one of her Syracuse-themed Instagram posts over the summer generated more than 2,400 likes and 150 comments.
Now she’s beginning to make an impact on the court, too.
Burge has taken on a significant role setting the Orange offense. She had 14 assists against Louisville in her ACC debut and delivered 27 assists, four digs, two kills and an ace against No. 2 Pitt on Sunday.
That combination is worth paying attention to.
Orange Fizz has already seen how Syracuse women’s athletes can reach huge audiences online. We wrote about the Syracuse women’s track program finding viral traction on social media last month. We also saw how Mary Allen went viral in women’s lacrosse last season. Burge’s post offers another example of athletes in sports outside football and basketball reaching large audiences.
And volleyball may be uniquely positioned to capitalize.
The NCAA has specifically pointed to social media as one of the forces behind volleyball’s growth. Syracuse’s volleyball IG account has more than 23K followers. During its breakout 2023 season, NCAA volleyball’s Instagram account generated the most impressions, engagements and video views among the sports included in the organization’s fall social-media campaign, while adding more than 61,000 followers.
That’s where Burge’s viral post becomes more than a fun Instagram anecdote.
It fits the way this sport is growing.
Syracuse sits in a major conference that already contains some of the country’s premier volleyball programs. Those teams will regularly come through the Women’s Building. And on Sunday, more than 800 people showed up to watch one of them.
The Orange don’t have to create interest in women’s volleyball from scratch.
The sport is already doing that for them.
Now Syracuse has to build a program—and give those new fans a reason to come back.
