On Sunday afternoon, Texas and Nebraskas womens volleyball teams will face each in the regular season for the first time in a decade. There wasn’t this kind of gap between matches before, however: the Longhorns and Huskers have an intense rivalry spanning decades, tied in part to the creation of the Big 12. At the Players Era Volleyball Showcase in Las Vegas on Aug. 30, the two will jump right into the new season by renewing that rivalry.
Nebraska and Texas had their first meeting back in 1981, less than 10 years after each program had begun, and just like on Sunday, it was hosted in neutral territory. The two played a pair of matches in the Oral Roberts Invitational on Oct. 17, with Texas winning both: the Longhorns would eventually be crowned the 1981 champions in the final season playing under the Associate for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women banner (AIAW), while the Huskers program was already part of the NCAA at this point; 1981 would mark the lone campaign that the team wasnt invited to the 20-team NCAA Division I tournament at the end of the regular season, and this despite its fourth-straight unbeaten season in Big 8 conference play.
In the 1982 Oklahoma Invitational, Nebraska would collect its first win against Texas, 3-1, but that would be the last victory for the Huskers against the Longhorns until Nov. 5, 1988 â both teams were already powerhouses by then, with Nebraska losing in the national championship in 1986 to Pacific, and Texas winning its second title later in 88. Nebraska would once again lose the national championship game in 1989, this time to Long Beach State â it took until 1995 for that to change⦠and against Texas.
That squad, led by First-Team All-American and American Volleyball Coaches Association (AVCA) Co-Player of the Year Allison Weston, was playing for more than just a championship in the moment. It was also playing for bragging rights within a soon-to-be-formed conference. For the 1995 championship, Nebraska was representing the Big 8, and Texas the Southwest Conference, but that was a temporary arrangement: Texas was one of four schools that had committed, back in Feb. 1994, to join the Big 8 and make it the Big 12 in 1996. Nebraska and Texas, two mainstays of womens volleyball in the midwest, two of the teams that had shown the sport could thrive outside of the West Coast, would now be in the same conference vying for supremacy.
Nebraska won 31 straight matches to end the season: the Huskers won the opening game, lost the second to Stanford, and then didnt taste failure again. Texas was the No. 2 team in the country and had won its two previous national championship games, while Nebraska was hoping that, for the Huskers, the third time would be the charm. It was, and now these two would be in the same conference going forward.
And what a run the pair had in the Big 12. Nebraska would win the conference in 1996. Texas would win it in 97. The Huskers would then take it in 1998 through 2002, and again from 2004 through 2006 â this stretch was interrupted by a single Big 12 regular season championship by Kansas State, but flanking that were a pair of Nebraska national championships, in 2000 and 2006. In 2007 and 2008, Texas and Nebraska tied for conference championship, then the Longhorns won it outright in 09. The Huskers would once again come out on top in 2010 â it was their final year in the Big 12, as now it was their turn to switch conferences. Nebraska joined up with the Big Ten in 2011, and remains there to this day.
With Nebraska gone, Texas, somewhat unsurprisingly, dominated the Big 12 in the Huskers absence. The Longhorns won 12 of 13 Big 12 conference regular season titles before leaving for the SEC in 2024, with national championships in 2012, 2022 and 2023 and three national title losses, as well. That 2023 championship came against Nebraska, which the Longhorns also defeated in the regional final in the delayed 2020 season as well as in 2021 â
