For Nebraska's Dani Busboom Kelly, home is where you hang a banner

DANI BUSBOOM KELLY started wearing blazers for her biggest volleyball matches long before she took over as coach of the best program in the country.

Back in 2019, years prior to her return home to Nebraska, Busboom Kelly, in her third year as Louisville head coach, laid out an array of Cardinal red jackets for her mother's input.

Bonnie Busboom ticked off her approval until she disapproved. I don't know what I think about that one.

She surveyed the red sequin blazer in front of her. It struck her as audacious, brash. Her daughter's team at that time was fine but unremarkable. Certainly not accustomed to splashy wins or deep tournament runs. Should the coach be peacocking around in sequins?

I like it. But I don't know about wearing it.

Busboom Kelly seemed on board with her mother's logic. She told her team she wouldn't break it out for a big match because she couldn't tolerate losing in sequins. Until No. 2-seeded Texas came along in the third round of the NCAA tournament.

"Then she walked out with that red sequin blazer on," Bonnie says. "And I just thought, 'Dani Busboom, what are you doing?'"

Here's what: She was putting Louisville -- and her own head coaching bona fides -- on the map.

The Longhorns were riding a 13-year run of reaching the regional finals; the Cardinals had never made the Elite Eight. Louisville put an end to both streaks that day, winning in five sets, and Bonnie tried to imagine what must've gone through Texas coach Jerritt Elliott's head when he caught sight of that blazer. "He probably thought, 'You little s---,'" she says.

That blazer meant something, is Bonnie's point. The blazer was the point.

"It said, 'I'm not afraid of you. I'm not afraid of nothin'.'"

HERE ARE SOME things that Dani Busboom Kelly, by all rights, could be afraid of:

Taking over for a living legend: John Cook spent 25 years coaching volleyball in Lincoln, Nebraska, and much of that quarter-century winning at historic rates -- including four national championships -- by the time he called it a career in January.

Taking over for a living legend at Nebraska: This volleyball program steeps itself in mystique and glory, and the relentless churn of expectations that come with both.

Taking over for a living legend at Nebraska in Nebraska: Busboom Kelly was born and raised in this place, just like her parents and their parents before them. And so on and so on. This was not a job relocation. This was a homecoming.

Dani Busboom Kelly, what are you doing?

IT'S THE EARLY days of November, and Busboom Kelly sits in her still-pretty-new office in the Devaney Center, contemplating why, exactly, these realities of hers are unique. Complex, even. But not, to her, all that daunting.

Over her right shoulder, a framed picture shows her in that sequin blazer, fist-pumping on the sideline in her Louisville days. Over her left shoulder, floor-to-ceiling windows overlook Nebraska's home court. John Baylor, who has called play-by-play for Nebraska volleyball for three decades, calls that court the "Greatest Show on Taraflex," and these days, it's housed in the recently-christened John Cook Arena.

Busboom Kelly coaches under the bright lights of Cook's name, which glow fluorescent above the Jumbotron, and a few hundred feet from his bronze likeness, thanks to the statue that was dedicated outside the arena in September. Sometimes she finds herself face-to-face with the man himself. Cook is now a Big Ten Network analyst, and he occasionally winds up interviewing his former -- and Busboom Kelly's current -- players.

She works in his literal shadow. But she does not feel overshadowed.

For starters, if Cook is sacred here, then she is one of his most faithful acolytes.

"I lived this place firsthand my whole life," she says. "I understand what he was doing every single day for our sport, for Nebraska. So it's like, 'Yeah, he deserves it.'"

Helping Busboom Kelly's cause, of course, is that she has spent her first year back in Lincoln under a kind of reverse Murphy's Law, where everything that can go right has gone ridiculously right. Her team is undefeated and sits unanimously ranked at No. 1; the Huskers didn't drop a set for two months beginning in mid-September, a 48-set win streak that ended only a few weeks ago against UCLA. They've swept their way through the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament. Now they'll take on Kansas in the Sweet Sixteen on Friday and, just maybe, face off against her old team, Louisville, in the Elite Eight.

But even short of the near-perfection Busboom Kelly has helped steer in Nebraska -- and all the goodwill that engenders -- she has a hard time seeing herself being cowed by Cook.

"I know him," she says. "I've worked with him, and talked with him. For years."

It's awfully hard to feel intimidated by someone, or the shadow of someone, you know like that. Especially someone you once told to shove off.

The well-tread story goes like this: Ahead of Busboom Kelly's senior season at Nebraska, Cook -- in his sixth year as head coach -- asked her to switch positions. The Huskers were fresh off losing a national title in 2005, were also losing their defensive specialist at libero, and had a young, talented setter named Rachel Holloway waiting in the wings. Holloway had been a starting setter and captain for the USA Youth National Team before committing to Nebraska; it made sense to Cook, then, for Busboom Kelly, a three-year starter at setter, to transition to the open spot. Busboom Kelly had zero warmth for the idea.

"Dani got pretty heated in the meeting and left, and I didn't see her for three days," Cook says. "She basically flipped me off and left my office. I thought she was gonna quit."

Bonnie Busboom swears Cook is revising a little history here. He didn't see Busboom Kelly for three days because it was winter break, she points out. He probably didn't see anyone for three days. But she does offer, with a smile, that the two had a propensity for butting heads. Cook pushed Busboom Kelly, and she'd push him right back. She was a bit rebellious; he didn't appreciate freelancing one little bit. The combination could be combustible.

"The whole thing was pride," Bonnie says. "It was just getting beat out. Because, truthfully, Dani Busboom had never been beat out in anything."

Busboom Kelly internalized the move to libero as a slight, which morphed into a dare. She decided she would be an elite libero -- a position she had never played -- and in about six months, she was. The Huskers won the NCAA championship in 2006 with Busboom Kelly anchoring their defense.

After graduation, she found a 9-to-5 office job in insurance didn't quite take, so she decided she would be an elite volleyball coach. Busboom Kelly was so single-minded in her pursuit that she failed to mention to Lane Kelly -- her husband now and longtime boyfriend then -- that she had applied for an assistant coaching job at Tennessee, at least until she made the final cut. She went to Knoxville to interview and about a week later, when Lane came home from work, she told him she got the job and was heading south. "You can come if you want," she said.

They went, and she found herself taping lines on the court and ushering feral cats out of the practice arena the team shared with ROTC. It was far from glamorous, even further from the trappings of Nebraska, but she knew she could do this and be good at it. Anywhere.

"It was about doing something on my own," she says. "Without the Nebraska name, without that behind me."

Assistant at Tennessee begat assistant at Louisville begat assistant at Nebraska begat head coach at Louisville, which turned into an eight-year clinic on how to author a program's glow-up. She won 82% of her games in those eight years, nearly 90% in the last four. "When we came here in 2021 at Louisville and swept Nebraska, that wasn't when I felt like, 'Oh, I should be the next head coach at Nebraska'," she says. "But it did create a bit of confidence. Like, 'I can do this at a high level.'"

Cook watched all this unfold from afar, though never all that far. He hired Busboom Kelly as an assistant, then tried to hire her as associate head coach, once she departed for her second stint in Louisville. But long before he coached with her, then against her, Cook caught glimpses of the coach Busboom Kelly would become.

The first time Cook visited her in high school, on the farm where she grew up, 25 miles south of Lincoln, Busboom Kelly showed him the motivational quotes she had scribbled in marker along her bedroom's cinderblock walls. "She was having big dreams, even back then," Cook says. "She didn't know it at the time, but she was already starting to get ready to coach."

Their clash over shifting to libero? "That was part of her forming into what it means to be a coach," he says. "Understanding sometimes you have to make tough decisions."

Cook had long seen Busboom Kelly as a coach. Then he saw her as the only coach he wanted to take over Nebraska.

By last winter, Louisville had been pushing for Busboom Kelly to sign a new contract with a prohibitive buyout clause. (The contract she had in place had a buyout, but carved out an exception for one school: Nebraska.) He knew that she was expecting her second child, that the roots she had planted in Louisville were growing deeper. Cook had already begun pondering retirement and then, suddenly and urgently, the timing felt right for him. In part because of her.

Busboom Kelly was back in Nebraska for a professional volleyball tournament in January, and Cook facilitated a meeting between her and Nebraska's athletic director, Troy Dannen. Within an hour of that meet-up, Dannen told Cook what Cook already knew: "She's the one."

THE DRILL, AS far as Rebekah Allick can tell, makes no sense.

Nebraska's senior middle blocker doesn't know where to go during a November practice, her teammates don't either. A Huskers' assistant coach resorts to yelling out the names of players and where they should be, but confusion abounds. Busboom Kelly, standing next to Allick, attempts to clarify.

Busboom Kelly: "Offense, you switch every five. Defense, every 10."

Allick: "Wait a minute. You just told me the opposite."

Busboom Kelly, embracing the absurdity of the moment, rests her head on Allick's shoulder, and laughs. "Just give me a minute," she says.

Dani Busboom Kelly, what are you doing?

It's a minor bout of turbulence during an otherwise idyllic year in Nebraska volleyball. But with her coach's head on her shoulder, Allick thinks to herself: "Dani's human."

"It's an appreciation honestly," she says. "Like, 'Thank you for showing your humanness.' I just feel like we can all breathe."

The volleyball team has been so good for so long, so unyielding in its dominance, that it commands more than attention. It compels worship.

A sampling: Nebraska's home sell-out streak dates to 2001, which makes it the longest streak in NCAA women's sports history. This year, the Huskers lead the NCAA in average attendance (8,575); the second-highest average attendance in the nation belongs to ... Nebraska, when it plays outside of Lincoln (8,151). Two years ago, they traded Devaney for Memorial Stadium for one night, and 92,003 people -- a world record for a women's sporting event -- filled the football stadium for a volleyball match. In the 2022 fiscal year, there were 522 women's athletics programs in the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC and Pac-12, but according to the Lincoln Journal Star, only one that turned a profit: Nebraska volleyball.

The devotion to the program has been rewarded: five national championships; the most wins in NCAA Division I history; the only program to be ranked in every Top 25 American Volleyball Coaches Association rankings since the weekly poll's introduction in 1982.

Nebraska volleyball is inevitable, a forever kind of greatness. Except Nebraskans have heard that story before.

"Ultimately, what I did not want to have happen to Nebraska volleyball," Cook says, "is what happened to Nebraska football."

The Huskers once had a football team with that forever kind of greatness. Then forever ended. As kind as this century has been to Nebraska volleyball, it has dispensed cruelty to Nebraska football, introducing something worse than mediocrity: irrelevance.

Busboom Kelly carries the weight of shepherding Nebraska away from that scourge of ordinariness. And she's doing it in ways that feel strange, unorthodox. With lightness.

By the end of her time in Louisville, the Cardinals were dominating at a Huskers-like pace, but winning -- at least at historic clips -- was still a novelty, each victory merited a celebration. Here, at Nebraska, "I go into the locker room and it's like" -- her voice goes limp, her arms droop in a lifeless wave -- "'yay, we won.' I want to make sure we're still enjoying the journey."

Lane, who played football at Nebraska, once attended a Southern Cal practice while visiting an old teammate back in the Pete Carroll days. Snoop Dogg was standing on the sideline, music blared -- it felt like a party. It felt light. When Lane thinks of Dani Busboom Kelly the coach, he thinks of that day with the Trojans. Nebraska's practices have their own flavor, but it's light there too. Busboom Kelly has been known to show up with under-eye masks still on, the little half-moons stuck firmly in place.

"I would say playing for her feels very ... free," says Harper Murray, Nebraska's star outside hitter.

Murray didn't take to Busboom Kelly right away, which she says had everything to do with her attachment to Cook. The two were so connected that before Cook delivered the news of his retirement to the team in January, he called Murray into his office to tell her first. Murray couldn't wrap her head around pouring herself into a new person the way she had with Cook. But glimpses of who Busboom Kelly was -- and the big and paradigm-shifting ways she was different from Cook -- chipped away at Murray's resistance.

Cook was a CEO; at times he could be rigid and unrelenting. Though Busboom Kelly is Cook's disciple, she is not his mirror image. She doesn't view this enterprise with grave severity and self-seriousness, and that frees her to be joyful in the process, to allow laughter to creep into practice, even when mistakes are made. She's open to taking risks, say, when she flouts conventional wisdom with a slew of player substitutions in any match, at any point. She can be emotionally vulnerable, like when she gave the Huskers the starting lineup for the first time and confessed that it was hard, that she wished she could put everyone out there. Murray remembers thinking then that she had only seen Cook cry once, at his retirement, and it was a strange but wonderful thing to be let in this way now.

That doesn't mean Busboom Kelly doesn't press them sometimes, or royally annoy them at other times, or doesn't bring her own specific brand of urgency.

"John demanded perfection," Allick says. "Dani demands excellence."

The daylight between those two demands has left her players unburdened. Because as much as they extol the privileges of playing this sport in this place, there's a cost to it too.

"I want our team to feel the weight of the team," Busboom Kelly says. "I don't want our team to feel the weight of the state."

BONNIE BUSBOOM PICKED up a phone call from her daughter in January.

"I'm doing it," she said. "We're coming home."

News of Nebraska's coaching earthquake -- Cook's surprise retirement; Busboom Kelly's insta-hiring -- had yet to go public, so Bonnie was sworn to secrecy. She called only her husband, Gene, who was 15 miles away working the family farm.

"Dani's coming home," she told him. (Gene, in a bit of Midwestern flair, responded: "Oh. Great.")

A few days later, with the news set to break, Bonnie told a close circle of family and friends. She phoned Busboom Kelly's childhood friend, Jenny Lempka. "She's coming home." She called another lifelong friend, Laura Francke. "She's coming home."

By the time the Huskers officially introduced Busboom Kelly as their new coach -- only its fourth in program history -- at a press conference in the first week of February, a healthy share of Nebraskans had worked themselves into a lather. That day, she was welcomed back to Lincoln in front of university brass and media and what, Nebraskans swear, must've been the whole of Gage County, where Busboom Kelly was born and raised.

The university helped her old K-12 school, Freeman, charter a pair of buses to the event; the school had to charter one more to meet demand. Andrew Havelka, the superintendent, made the trip and estimates the Freeman section was 500 strong -- though he heard rumors of as many as 600 or 700. (A figure, it's worth noting, that exceeds the 604-person population of Adams, Nebraska, the town that's home to Freeman.)

The joke went that it would be a good day to rob the Adams Bank, though that would've been a real shame for Lempka, whose family has owned the bank that anchors Main Street in Adams for five generations. That's how it works here. Everyone knows everyone else. Everyone knows Dani Busboom Kelly, or at least feels like they do.

"There's not very many acquaintances," she says. "It's more like you kinda consider everybody family."

Lempka left Adams for a stretch and joked that by the time she moved back, she could tell years had passed because she knew who drove which cars, and they were all driving new ones. Now she lives two doors down from Bonnie and Gene, who traded their house on the family farm in nearby Cortland, where Busboom Kelly grew up, for "city life" in Adams about a year ago. Havelka lives about five houses away. Gene used to coach softball at Freeman; Busboom Kelly's sister-in-law teaches there now. Sheila Day oversees the Cortland Museum, stationed in a 142-year-old white clapboard house, and she's family too. Day's sister is married to Busboom Kelly's uncle.

Day takes care to note the Busbooms' long footprint in this town, which is preserved in the museum. There's the museum's new Busboom Kelly display, complete with a biography and photos of her Nebraska athletics lineage. Gerald, Gene's father, is there too, palming a basketball in a black-and-white photograph of the 1951 Beatrice Times Dream Team.

Cortland is tiny, a village that was originally laid out in a corn field back in the 1880s and has the feel that not all that much has changed in the intervening centuries.

And so Busboom Kelly was a farm kid, like nearly all Cortland kids. Her family farm sits off State Highway 41, a mile-and-half down a dirt road, and a quarter-mile in any direction from their closest neighbor. The Busbooms farm corn and beans, and raise cattle too.

Busboom Kelly loved so much about that farm. The plot of land where she and her younger brother would play softball with Gene when he took a break from farming -- if the ball landed in the hog lot, it was a home run. The pond on her grandmother's land a few miles down the road where she'd take Lane and their friends for camping trips in college, breathers from Lincoln and what it meant to be an athlete there.

After Bonnie and Gene moved out, their son Ryan moved in, and a new generation of Busbooms will now grow to live and love the land. Busboom Kelly's nephews are in her old room, where motivational quotes were once plastered on the walls. Her son, Boone, visits and likes to think the bulls on the property are his own.

In a post-match radio show this season, Cook took a brief break from volleyball to talk farming and combining. He may not be from Nebraska, but he earned his stripes in 25 years. Busboom Kelly chimed in to say her father had just wrapped up his harvest. Baylor, the play-by-play man, listened to their conversation and weighed in, "That's the first post-match coach's interview in the history of the sport where the head coach said, 'My dad has the harvest in.'"

"It's just ... it's moving," he says. "If you grew up here, it moves you. You're tied to the land."

Busboom Kelly is not the first Nebraskan called back to this land. Scott Frost had his own homecoming here eight years ago. He, too, grew up in small-town Nebraska, went on to be a Husker, won a championship, then came back to lead his former team. He didn't survive his fifth season as head football coach before being fired.

Busboom Kelly is not Frost, and the volleyball program she inherited is not the football program he did. About this is much, Cook is adamant: Frost simply did not come armed with the program-building experience that Busboom Kelly did. And by the time Frost returned home, Nebraska's football team was in free fall. Busboom Kelly, on the other hand, was given the "keys to a Ferrari," Cook says. That much was by design. He needed to set her up for success because he couldn't abide a Nebraska football-like implosion; he couldn't stomach another homecoming going up in smoke.

To be sure, it's working out just fine so far for Busboom Kelly. But the specter of other homecomings gone wrong does not plague her.

"I feel like I am maybe a little bit different than a lotta Nebraskans," she says. "I really could see myself being happy in a lot of places."

She has roots here but doesn't feel the need to be rooted here. And so coaching in Nebraska is not her burden. It's her gift.

She and Lane loved their years in Louisville, enough that, after the whirlwind of coming home to Nebraska settled, she felt a twinge of something strange and unexpected: reverse homesickness.

"It was a weird feeling to process," she says. "I'm home but I'm feeling homesick for someplace else."

And yet, there never really could be someplace else, at least not now, and not without giving this Nebraska experiment a true run.

"If I didn't do this," she says, "it'd be the biggest regret of my life."

On the family farm, there's a rock formation in front of her childhood house. Etched onto the stone: "THE BUSBOOMS."

She is tied to the land.

NOT FAR FROM that rock, back when the house was still Bonnie's and Gene's, a trampoline sat outside. Busboom Kelly would be out on the trampoline a lot, lying down, looking up at the stars at night. She couldn't camp out on the grass because too many bugs would get her, so she'd take refuge on the trampoline, look up and think.

"Just appreciating what's around her," Bonnie surmises. "But thinking about whatever's going on too."

The trampoline is long gone, and Busboom Kelly hardly has any time for quiet reflection these days. She's managing the No. 1 team in the country, and she has two boys at home -- Boone, her toddler, and Jett, who was born just a few months after they came back to Nebraska.

"I think it'd be different if I was single, or even if I was just married without kids," she says. "There'd be more time to sit, and stew, and overthink."

Back when John Cook was hired 25 years ago, he heard from a slew of people who told him not to take the Nebraska job. What was he going to be able to do that Nebraska volleyball had not done already? He kicked off his tenure by going undefeated and winning a national championship in his first season, then added several more titles and historic dominance to their ledger along the way. So now, all these years later, that same question could be rightfully asked of Busboom Kelly. What could she possibly do?

"Maybe win back-to-back," she says. "That hasn't been done here. And there hasn't been a dynasty."

In all the decades Nebraska has been at the pinnacle of collegiate volleyball, there's always been a handful of years between each championship. A moment, however brief, when this place that lionizes volleyball couldn't lay claim to its crown.

"So I think that's maybe something I could do."

There's no trampoline, no vast Nebraska night sky overhead. But she's still appreciating what's around her, still thinking about what's going on and what is yet to come.

Dani Busboom Kelly, what are you going to do next?