Home court advantage: How USA Olympians are building pro volleyball dreams in Utah
By Estella Weeks
The crowd erupts in screams and cheers after each set. Pop music blares during timeouts and team huddles, prompting fans to stand up and dance.
About 3,000 fans pack Bruin Arena at Salt Lake Community College on this Saturday night for Salt Lake City's final game of the inaugural season of LOVB Pro, the nation's newest professional volleyball league.
Olympic gold and silver medalists Jordyn Poulter and Haleigh Washington playfully taunt the opposing team from their side of the net. Fans giggle and point at the interaction while shaking handmade posters. Friendship bracelets pass from hand to hand among young fans.
This is more than a volleyball game. It feels like a family reunion.
The league LOVB Pro, pronounced “Love Pro,” hosted its first matches in January 2025 with six teams based in Atlanta, Austin, Houston, Madison, Omaha and Salt Lake City. Four months later, games like the season closer in Utah are indicative of success, said Poulter, a co-founding athlete of the team.
But success was never guaranteed.
When the 11 founding athletes envisioned the league in 2020, they knew it would be a risk, Poulter said. To make their athlete forward league come to life, they would have to leave behind better-paying European gigs to build the organization from the ground up.
“When I was on that first call, I was like, I'm not signing onto something four years in the future, that's just too much time,” she said. “There's so much unknown and variability in between. I remember thinking, wow, if this comes to fruition, this is the dream.”
Poulter felt it was a risk worth taking.
At this point in their careers, Poulter and Washington had been away from home for years. Both Colorado natives were playing in what is widely considered the top women’s volleyball league in the world, Italy’s Serie A1.
After graduating college—Poulter from the University of Illinois in 2018 and Washington from Penn State in 2017 —both athletes said they dreamed of making a career in the game they loved. They moved to Europe to play professional volleyball, something they couldn't do in the United States since there was no league yet developed.
But homesickness had long since set in, and the long winter days at the base of the Italian Alps had gotten to them, they said. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, everything got harder.
In the early months of the pandemic, Poulter and Washington joined nine other athletes on a Zoom call, one of the first steps in creating a new professional women’s volleyball league in the United States. They were asked to be the league’s founding athletes, building on their previous experience and successes to help develop the organization.
“There was a stubbornness… I said I was going for Paris so I did it. Out of spite. Out of love. Out of the decision I made. And now, to turn around and help build something like this, something that gives more people a chance to dream that big, it means everything,” said Washington.
Poulter said there were many reasons a new league was needed, but one of the main motives was helping players like her and Washington have more opportunities to stay close to home and be psychologically healthy.
“If we can keep American talent on American soil,” Poulter said, “mental health tends to be better.”
Rapid Growth
In comparison to other professional sports leagues, LOVB Pro is in its humble beginnings. However with over 18,000 followers in Instagram and on more than one occasion playing in a sold out crowd, the league's popularity is surging. But, it may also be a sport-wide trend.
In 2004, about 1,750 junior clubs were registered with USA Volleyball, according to the organization. Now, there are nearly 4,000.
The growth of youth teams coincides with a growing audience for women’s college volleyball, which broke a world record for the most attended women’s sports event. OnAug. 30, 2023, the University of Nebraska’s Cornhuskers filled Memorial Stadium in Lincoln with more than 92,000 fans to watch the women’s volleyball team defeat the Omaha Mavericks.
“There’s a really big swell happening right now in the sport,” Washington said. “People care. People are ready for this. It’s just about giving them something to care about consistently.”
Although several professional volleyball leagues, some co-ed and others explicitly for women, had come and gone in the United States over the past few decades, previous leagues had failed in the past. LOVB pro resolved to change that, Washington said..
She said she knew that if the league failed, she and the other athletes would be the faces of that failure.
“It’s my face and my name, as well as the other founding athletes’ faces and names, that are going to get recognized the most,” Washington said. “So, when it flops and fails, nobody’s going to be mad at the COO or the CEO or the CFO, because they barely know who those people are.”
That’s a particular risk in a league that, unlike most other professional sports organizations, was founded not just by investors but by athletes themselves.
In Atlanta, it was Olympic gold medalists Fabiana Claudino and Kelsey Robinson-Cook. In Houston, it was gold medalists Micha Hancock and Jordan Thompson. In Madison, it was silver medalist Lauren Carlini. In Omaha, it was four-time Olympian Jordan Larson and two-time Olympian Justine Wong-Orantes. In Austin, it was bronze medalist Carli Lloyd.
And, in Salt Lake City, it was Poulter and Washington.
They’re expected not just to play but help develop the league.
“[The league] wanted to pick the kind of founding athletes that were good people, had good hearts, were good characters, and I think that’s a majority of the USA team,” Washington said. “We have a lot of great girls.”
The role of a founding athlete can be demanding and time consuming, Poulter said. On top of regular practice times, founding athletes commit to media roles such as advertising, interviews, branding and partnerships—all of which is paying off, she added.
“I pinch myself every day,” Poulter said. “I hope that this decision we all made to play in League One will be the next shoulders for future generations to stand on.”
Keeping Talent In America
Volleyball was invented in the United States in the late 1800s, but European audiences have taken a particular liking to the game. The competition, market and wages in European countries draw in athletes after their collegiate careers end. Getting whisked away to Europe to play professional volleyball alongside and against some of the world’s best players might sound ideal. But that’s not always the case.
“In America, we have this vision of you’re in Italy, so it’s pasta and Vespas and coffee and Italian men,” Washington said. “Is not that. It’s 10 long months of being in a gym and traveling and having to work really hard. The depression is real.”
But with limited options for playing professional volleyball in the United States, many of the best athletes—like Washington and Poulter—would leave the country in search of better paychecks and higher competition.
“We all played overseas, and the amount of money we could make there is better,” Poulter said. “Being so far from home, you're living this alternate life. The overseas schedule is so much longer …The injuries a lot of us sustained were probably due to playing 15 weeks straight. It was too much for too long.”
Katlyn Gao, a Harvard Business School graduate and the league’s chief executive, said League One has the potential to change these dynamics.
“We have 400 girls that have to go abroad if they want to continue in the world of volleyball,” Gao told NPR in 2021. “And many of them don't really want to. They want to be closer to home, closer to the communities that they have been brought up in.”
The Future of LOVB Pro
When LOVB was first conceptualized, five years ago, there were no other women’s professional volleyball leagues in the United States. Today there are three, including the Pro Volleyball Federation, which finished its inaugural season in 2024, and Athletes Unlimited, a short-season league that plays all of its games during five weeks each fall in Mesa, Ariz., with live broadcasts on ESPN and Bally Sports.
The combined leagues have drawn more than $200 million in investments. LOVB additionally runs scores of junior clubs in dozens of locations across the country and a training center in Wisconsin. League One has also orchestrated branding deals with Revolve, BSN Sports, and Spanx and plans to expand with two more teams by 2027.
Alissa Iverson, LOVB Salt Lake City’s marketing and communications manager, said there’s still a lot of work to do.
“We truly are a startup league,” she said. “Some of us are a one-man team trying to make a difference across an entire state and across an entire country, but I think that we’ve done it right in terms of starting small.”
Every new professional sports organization wants to draw crowds, build stadiums and make money. The founding athletes of LOVB Pro want to reach those goals as well. But Washington said there’s even more at stake.
“We’re not just building a league,” she said. “We’re trying to change the entire ecosystem of women’s volleyball in this country. And that takes time. But I want little girls growing up knowing they can dream about playing pro here, at home, and actually make it happen.”