NCAA looking at larger venues
By Ann Miller
Advertiser Staff Writer
LINCOLN, Neb. — The Nebraska Coliseum, site of today's Central Regional, is 76 years old. Volleyball utilizes approximately half of what looks like a huge, brick fieldhouse. The other side is a Recreational Sport facility and a place to hang the men's and women's bowling national championship banners.
Volleyball is still played on the wood floor at the Coliseum — not the sport court most schools lay out — and all 4,030 seats are bleachers. General admission tickets during the regular season are sold only for three corners of the arena, which have extremely limited visibility. The rest of the seats belong to season ticket holders.
Ticket packages sold out in 30 minutes Monday for what might be the final regional played in the Coliseum. Along with moving to pre-determined regional sites next year, the NCAA Women's Volleyball Committee would like to upgrade to larger venues. Sites must have a minimum capacity of 4,000 to bid — for now — and even this year top-seeded USC and fourth-seeded Northern Iowa, which both have small gyms, were denied regionals.
A story in the Lincoln Journal Star yesterday indicated Nebraska is torn between the Coliseum and the 13,500-seat Devaney Sports Center for its 2003 regional bid, which must be turned in by Jan. 10. The Cornhuskers are 375-24 all-time at the Coliseum and 36-1 in the postseason. They go into this regional with a 62-match home winning streak, second-longest in NCAA history.
QUICK SETS: North Carolina might be in its first volleyball Sweet 16, but it has won 17 NCAA women's soccer championships, four titles each in men's basketball, field hockey and men's lacrosse and one each in women's basketball and men's soccer. ... The Tar Heels are decked out in "swoosh" from the caps on their heads to the sneakers on their feet. They are in the first year of an eight-year contract extension with Nike. The agreement provides $100,000 annually to both the Chancellor's Academic Enhancement Fund and the UNC athletic department, along with all 28 teams' shoes, apparel, equipment bags and other products. ...North Carolina is the "Tar Heel State," though no one is quite sure why. One story goes back to the Revolutionary War, when British General Cornwallis' troops were crossing a river in North Carolina and found tar in the water to impede their progress. Another story attributes that predicament to the War Between the States. Yet another story comes from a letter that quotes a general as saying, "There they stand as if they have tar on their heels."
