Set for Success

When 92,000 people showed up at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Memorial Stadium in August 2023 for a women’s college volleyball game, the sports world took notice. It was the largest crowd ever for a women’s sporting event.  

Katlyn Gao. Photo Credit: Molly Cranna

But Katlyn Gao ’01 wasn’t surprised. “Volleyball has been popular for 50 years due to Title IX, and it has emerged as a uniquely woman-led game,” says Gao, who grew up watching professional women’s volleyball in China in the ’80s.   

Despite the sport’s popularity, there hasn’t been a successful pro league established in the U.S. But Gao, co-founder and CEO of League One Volleyball (LOVB), aims to change that. The 5-year-old volleyball organization is launching LOVB Pro, a women’s volleyball professional circuit that’s set to begin regular season play this January. Gao co-founded LOVB with Peter Hirschmann ’99 MBA.   

The league will open with franchises in Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Houston; Madison, Wis.; Omaha, Neb.; and Salt Lake City. And even before the first match, LOVB Pro is off to a hot start. Ten players from the U.S. women’s Olympic team, which won a silver medal in Paris, have signed on to play in the league. ESPN has media rights to the LOVB Pro broadcasts. And early backers include tennis icon Billie Jean King ’17 H, former Olympic gold medal–winning skier Lindsey Vonn, WNBA legend Candace Parker and NBA All-Star Kevin Durant.  

LOVB Pro aims to provide world-class volleyball players an opportunity to earn a living playing their sport in the U.S. “Despite how good we are on the Olympic level, when players come home, there’s nothing here for them,” Gao says. “Our best players go abroad to play in professional leagues in Europe and Asia.   

“That was a huge opportunity that we identified early on,” says the former Lululemon executive.      

And, unlike other pro sports — such as the WNBA, which partners with the NBA on select sponsorships and shared facilities — women’s volleyball stands apart from the men’s game, she says.     

“Volleyball doesn’t really have a ‘big brother’ comparison,” says Gao. “No one’s comparing the women’s game to the men’s. A lot of women’s leagues in other sports have been built by leveraging the infrastructure of the men’s leagues. We had the luxury to design the league in a way that felt true to the culture of volleyball, which is extremely team and community–oriented — so much so that our name is literally abbreviated to ‘love.’”  

On the junior level, volleyball is the team sport with the highest participation among girls in the U.S. It’s bigger — and growing faster — than basketball, soccer or softball. “This is a mainstream sport by the numbers,” says Gao. Over the past four years, LOVB has become the largest youth volleyball community in the United States. It runs 50 junior volleyball clubs, with more than 14,000 athletes competing on 1,300 teams across 23 states.     

LOVB’s “community-up” model ties youth clubs to pro teams. In Madison, for example, players on LOVB’s Madtown Juniors club train at the same state-of-the-art facility used by the pro players. And the league’s 2025 in-season tournament, the LOVB Classic, will take place in Kansas City, Mo., in February alongside the Triple Crown National Invitational Tournament, an annual elite youth volleyball event.   

“Not a single pro league in the U.S. has ever been built intentionally from youth level from the very start,” says Gao. “We’re thinking, ‘What’s right for volleyball?’ We’re building something that’s here to last. We’re building a legacy league.”