When you think volleyball you probably think of warm weather states, usually the southwest as the place for the best competition. You aren’t wrong, there are some great teams like Stanford, but arguably the best concentration of top tier collegiate volleyball programs is in the Midwest, in the Big Ten.

On Top

The Big Ten is considered one of if not the best conference in a number of major sports and one of them is women’s volleyball. Day in and day out during the season you see heavyweight matchups with top-10 and top-5 squads on both sides of the net. If you look at postseason history overall but really in the last decade or so, Big Ten teams are all over the rankings and NCAA tournament.

If you look at last season, Wisconsin and Nebraska faced off in the NCAA National Championship, the most watched collegiate volleyball match in television history. Wisconsin won three sets to two and again showed how great the conference was as four of the eight final teams in the NCAA tournament were part of the Big Ten.

In 2019 and 2018, the conference sent seven teams to the tournament with four of them making it to the elite eight. Wisconsin and Nebraska also each made it to the National Championship game, both falling to Stanford.

Side Out

In five of the last 10 years, a Big Ten team has hoisted the trophy at the end of the season. Nine Big Ten teams have played in the National Championship game in that time. Since 2000, 12 current Big Ten teams have won National Championships. What unbelievable numbers.

Putting aside the postseason success for a second, let’s look at season top-25 rankings. In the time period from 2011 to 2020/21 (season was played by some in fall and some in spring), only four teams have been ranked in every poll. Two of those are Nebraska and Penn State. Of the top 10 schools in the rankings over that time, four are part of the premier conference.

In 2019 alone, seven Big Ten teams were ranked at one point, outnumbered by the Pac-12 who had 10. However, in terms of total weeks ranked in the top-25, the Big Ten totaled 101 to the Pac-12s 86. Some pretty impressive staying power.

That’s a lot of numbers but what it does is illustrates how the conference and all of its members are consistently so good. The level of play has been so elite that the Big Ten decided to have a media day for the sport, the first of its kind in a major conference outside of football or basketball. That alone shows how much people believe in Big Ten volleyball and its supremacy.

Since there are no major volleyball leagues in the U.S. that have gained steam, the best competition is the collegiate level and it rarely disappoints. There are great teams across the country, no one can dispute that. But the concentration of consistently great teams like Wisconsin, Nebraska, Penn State, Minnesota, Purdue, etc. lives in one place. And that place is the Big Ten.