Path to Big Easy won't be so easy

By Ann Miller
Advertiser Staff Writer

LINCOLN, Neb. — When you land, 11 hours and three flights after leaving Honolulu, the sky here is gray and the ground is brown. It is 37 degrees at high noon.

"Just make sure they dress warm," advised three-time Nebraska All-American Fiona Nepo, a University High graduate and Husker volunteer coach who returned to Lincoln two months ago to train for a national team tryout. "It's not about bulking up, it's about layering. And don't come in slippers."

The Rainbow Wahine are here — slipper-less — with their 32-1 record and No. 6 seed in the NCAA Volleyball Championship. They play 11th-seeded North Carolina (32-3) tomorrow in a Central Regional semifinal at Nebraska Coliseum. The third-seeded Cornhuskers (30-1), who have been ranked behind Hawai'i all season despite a more difficult schedule and 26-match winning streak, play Miami (27-5) in the other semifinal.

"We're not at our house, we don't have our fans, traveling to the cold is horrible," UH captain Margaret Vakasausau says.

Then abruptly she stops her litany of Lincoln drawbacks.

"We have these little road blocks," she claims suddenly, smiling as she reverses course. "God just likes putting these challenges in front of us."

Tomorrow's winners meet Saturday for the right to advance to next week's final four in New Orleans. Getting to the Big Easy will be more than a little difficult.

The Tar Heels, in their first Sweet 16, start four seniors and are balanced enough to bother the 'Bows. Miami, making its first NCAA appearance, is a complete mystery. And the Huskers are all but unbeatable in their beloved Coliseum. They are 19-3 in regionals at home and 3-7 when they go away.

"Playing in there is my best memory of Nebraska," says Nepo, the career assists leader at a school that has produced 13 All-America setters. "The atmosphere and the fans are awesome."

This match sold out early and Husker fans have been calling Hawai'i to try to buy its unused allotment of tickets. The Coliseum's "capacity" is 4,030, yet Nebraska averages 4,395 a match. That's 3,000 fewer than Hawai'i — the only school where volleyball is a revenue-producing sport — but it might purely be a case of where size matters.

The Huskers would draw more in the Bob Devaney Sports Center, where the basketball teams play. They have been to five final fours in the past seven years and won two national championships. But they prefer the cozy ambience of their Coliseum, where fans are 10 feet away and opposing teams have not won in more than three years.

But it is not the Coliseum that scares the Rainbow Wahine, it is the travel.

"It's just a hard trip to make," said senior Jennifer Carey, long before she and her teammates sleep-walked through Lincoln Municipal Airport yesterday.

Should the Rainbows run the table and reach New Orleans, they will travel some 33,000 miles this season. No team has it tougher. Nebraska makes many more trips, but all are shorter and the vast majority are by bus or chartered plane.

The Huskers know nothing of red-eye flights over the ocean and multiple layovers. They come home to a place that is flat and often frozen after a trip of a day or two.

Hawai'i has gone to Asia for training and Gainesville, Fla., for tournaments but this is as far from home as it has ever gone if you add the figurative to the literal. Nothing about this capital of Nebraska, from the American Historical Society of Germans From Russia Museum to the extra charge for rental cars not properly cleaned from hunting adventures, reminds the Rainbows of home.

Except possibly Nepo, who knew she was no longer in paradise when she woke one morning to find snow blocking her window — on the eighth floor.

"You can't just go somewhere and kick back here, like the beach or Zippy's," she said. "Here, everything is inside."

Fortunately, "everything" includes volleyball. Snow is forecast for today.