Interest spikes for volleyball-basketball event

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CHAMPAIGN – Ashley Edinger has plenty of reasons to vividly remember her first collegiate volleyball match.

At least 3,129 of them.

That's how many fans showed up at Huff Hall on a late-August night in 2006 to watch Edinger and her Illinois teammates play Illinois State in the inaugural "Stuff Huff" promotion.

"Oh, my gosh, look at all these fans," the Illini senior libero recalls thinking as she walked onto the court that night. "And I'm this little freshman, starting right away. It was so exciting."

Three years later, Edinger & Co. are preparing to play in front of a home crowd Friday night that is expected to dwarf any in their experience. The kind of crowd that only the 16,618-seat Assembly Hall can accommodate. The kind of crowd that just could set an attendance record for an NCAA volleyball match.

Welcome to "Spike the Record."

"Which is Stuff Huff times 10," Edinger said.

Well, maybe not that big, but you get the idea. In a bid to break the existing attendance record of 13,870 – set earlier this year at Nebraska – the UI athletics promotions department has printed 125,000 tickets for free distribution.

The 6:30 p.m. match against Minnesota will serve as the opening act for Illini Madness, the annual public unveiling of Bruce Weber's men's and Jolette Law's women's basketball teams. Given the widespread popularity of Illinois men's basketball in particular, it's a safe bet the Illini volleyball attendance record of 4,316 – set in 1992 – will fall.

"It's a brilliant idea," Edinger said. "The (basketball) fans are going to be there either way. I'm just really excited to see the turnout – for us and for basketball."

Big arena, big match

So is Kevin Hambly, although the UI volleyball coach admits to fretting a bit, too, about the potential impact of relocating this matchup between two Top 10 volleyball teams. For No. 10 Illinois and No. 6 Minnesota, this is a Big Ten showdown with major implications for both teams.

"It's a big match so it worries me that we're not in the friendly confines of Huff," Hambly said this week before a practice, "because this place gets rockin'."

Hambly recently spoke to coaching peers whose schools staged similar big-arena promotions. He learned North Carolina went 1-1 in such circumstances, and Purdue lost its match.

"So that makes me more nervous," he said.

But what Hambly also heard from Purdue's Dave Shondell and North Carolina's Joe Sagula convinced the UI coach to embrace the one-night move to the Assembly Hall.

"After the year, when they talked to their players and asked them what was their favorite match, they said playing in front of that crowd and in that kind of environment meant more to them," Hambly said.

The Illini coach anticipates his players will have the same reaction and the same memories with "Spike the Record."

"How many opportunities are they going to have in their lives to play in front of potentially close to 17,000 people?" Hambly said. "Probably never again. So how can you pass up an opportunity like that?

"It's really something special for our girls that they'll remember for the rest of their lives, and probably the people in the community will remember for the rest of their lives."

Making the change

Preparations at the Assembly Hall for Illini Madness began Wednesday morning. One night after the Hall hosted a touring Broadway Series show, workers put the basketball court in place. That afternoon, tape lines were adhered to the court to configure it for volleyball dimensions.

"We're going to use black (tape) for the volleyball because our (painted) basketball lines are white," said Tom Divan, the Assembly Hall's assistant director of operations.

Similar taping was done on the court when the Bulls and Jazz played an exhibition game in October 2008 at the Assembly Hall.

This morning, Assembly Hall workers plan to install a rented portable volleyball net system. Unlike the net poles at Huff Hall, which are secured into the floor, the portable net system stands on its own.

"So it can all be fairly quickly taken down to convert back to basketball," Divan said.

The Illini volleyball team was scheduled to practice this afternoon at the Assembly Hall to get a feel for a venue that isn't nearly as cozy as 4,050-seat Huff Hall.

Hambly said the biggest adjustment his players will face in the Assembly Hall, particularly anyone passing the ball, is depth perception.

"The depth from the net back to the fans is a lot further than it is in Huff," the Illini coach said. "You're used to the wall being this close, and now there's no wall and there's just people and it goes (back) for a long way. We don't see that very much."

Still, Illinois' veterans have played in a few comparably roomy venues on Big Ten trips to Wisconsin, Ohio State and Iowa. And earlier this season, the Illini played in a tournament at New Mexico State's 12,482-seat Pan American Center.

"And we handled that fine," Hambly said. "We passed actually really well there."

Talking points

Edinger says she's hearing "a ton" of people on campus talking it up and vowing to show up. Off campus, the senior libero has run into "Spike the Record"-aware fans, too.

"They'll see me in an Illini volleyball sweatshirt and say 'We'll be there,' " Edinger said. "It's really exciting to see all the support we have."

But Edinger professes to have tunnel vision when she's on the court, a trait that figures to be essential for any player Friday night if the crowd is as large as some anticipate.

"We're hoping for a big number (of fans), but the most important thing that night is our match against Minnesota, so we really have to make sure we're ready for that and not focused on how many people are coming," Edinger said.

Hambly calls his team's involvement in Illini Madness a "perfect storm" of scheduling. His Illini happened to have a home match on the same date as the basketball event. And it happened to be against a Top 10 opponent guided by a former Illini coach (Mike Hebert) who built the program into a national power.

"I don't think that's going to be that way every year," Hambly said. "Probably not every year are we even going to be home."

For that reason, Hambly says it's premature to speculate on future UI volleyball ties to Illini Madness.

"I would like to see how it goes and how our team responds," he said. "But it sure seems like it's going to be special."

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