Hallie GrossmanDec 11, 2025, 07:40 AM ETCloseStaff Writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine Joined ESPN The Magazine after graduating from Penn State University. Covers college football and college basketball.Follow on X
Game On: Replacing a legend at Nebraska (7:51)Dani Busboom Kelly, a two-time Nebraska national champion, is now the Cornhuskers’ head coach, succeeding her mentor John Cook. (7:51)
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.
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?
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?'”
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.'”
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.”
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, embracing the absurdity of the moment, rests her head on Allick’s shoulder, and laughs. “Just give me a minute,” she says.
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.
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.”
“I would say playing for her feels very … free,” says Harper Murray, Nebraska’s star outside hitter.
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.
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.”
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.
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 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.