Laura Frost remembers vividly the day that she and her Kansas teammates tied the Nebraska volleyball team.
Not just the historic result, not just the fact that KU and NU split a pair of sets in Robinson Gymnasium during her senior year as a Jayhawk, but exactly where within the gym the fateful tie took place.
“I can tell you which side,” Frost recalled in a recent interview. “It was on the south side of the gym. I could walk you over there and tell you what court it was on.”
The problem is that the historical record disagrees with Frost’s recollection of the match.
KU is set to face off against Nebraska in the Sweet 16 on Friday in Lincoln, Nebraska. It will be the 90th all-time meeting between the former league rivals, a series that — if you peruse the KU or NU record books — the powerhouse Cornhuskers lead an astounding 88-0-1. The Jayhawks will be looking for their first-ever win as they battle a perennial championship contender with five titles to its name — but they do have one tie on the books.
In light of those circumstances, it seemed like an appropriate time for the Journal-World to attempt to locate the women responsible for the “1,” a number apparently etched in history, at least according to Nebraska’s website, in Lincoln on Nov. 15, 1977.
But nearly 50 years removed from the match in question, participants’ accounts and recollections vary, if they can remember at all. And at least one prominent figure in the story believes such a match simply didn’t happen, a belief so firm — and, as it turned out, supported by evidence — that Nebraska may erase the tie from its records altogether.
Disputed dates
In its volleyball record book, KU cites the date of its lone draw with the Cornhuskers as Nov. 5, 1977, and declares it part of a “Jayhawk Invitational” tournament that took place in Lawrence.
The problem is that Nebraska was not in Lawrence on that day. In its first year under legendary coach Terry Pettit, the volleyball team was in fact in Los Angeles for the National Women’s Invitational tournament, as the archives of the Sunday Journal and Star (now the Lincoln Journal-Star) can attest. It did split a match that day, just not against KU.
KU and Nebraska didn’t tie, either, on the date recorded on the KU website’s 1977 volleyball schedule, Nov. 12. Granted, both teams were in fact in Lincoln that day for the Nebraska Invitational tournament. June James (née Koleber), a two-time all-conference player for the Jayhawks, remembered that event in particular.
“I remember being in a tournament in Lincoln because some of us got in the football game for a hot second to see the fans,” she wrote in an email — indeed, Kansas and Nebraska faced off in football in Lincoln that same day. “Honestly that is all I remember.”
Alas, among the numerous results that weekend, there was no KU-NU tie. KU won against Iowa State and Nebraska’s junior varsity team, tied Iowa, Omaha and the same junior varsity team again, and lost to Minnesota. Nebraska, meanwhile, beat everyone it faced and won the tournament title.
KU and NU each played six matches in the span of a single day.
“That’s just volleyball,” Frost said. “Anybody that plays club volleyball, that’s what you do. You play all day long. That’s just part of playing volleyball.”
Frost, for her part, contended that the tie occurred not in the fall of 1977 but as part of the Big Eight tournament in Lawrence a full year later, in 1978, a competition in which she was named to the all-tournament team.
The extent of Nebraska’s investment in women’s sports was clear in those days, Frost said.
“Back then it was like you go to Nebraska and you’d be in awe because of the arena they played in,” she recalled. “We just played in Robinson Gym.”
And it was in Robinson Gym that the following took place, by her account: KU won the first set — “I remember we were so excited, because if we won the second game, that meant we could call it a win” — and Nebraska came back for the second. As she put it, without a third set, we’ll never know what could have happened.
“I’m surprised I don’t know the scores,” Frost added, “because usually even that sticks in my head.”
Again, though, contemporaneous reports beg to differ. “Husker women win Big Eight,” a Sunday Journal and Star headline proclaimed on Oct. 29, 1978, as the text beneath declared that Nebraska went 6-0 in the tournament. The Huskers did need three sets in a best-of-three match to take down KU on that day, but they won the first and lost the second.
That’s about it in terms of firm recollections of tying Nebraska, at least among the former Jayhawks who responded to inquiries for this story. Karen Epperson, KU’s setter in 1977, said, “To be honest with you, I do not recall that game at all.”
“I honestly do not remember us tying with Nebraska,” she added. “That would have been thrilling.”
Rene Stutzman is oddly the only 1977 letterwinner listed in KU’s record book, but she had quit the team by the time Nebraska rolled around.
“I was a freshman walk-on, a farm kid who found microeconomics and beginning French tougher than I had anticipated,” she wrote in an email.
The one date seemingly left unscathed by contravening evidence was Nov. 15, 1977. That came a few days after the Nebraska Invitational. It’s the date on which Nebraska’s own media guide and website suggest that it tied KU in Lincoln (the lone exception amid its 88 victories), and one with sufficient cachet as to have been cited in an article on the NCAA’s official website.
Neither the Lincoln nor Lawrence paper, however, provides much reason to believe that a volleyball match took place on that Tuesday night. The following day’s Lincoln Journal included a brief preview of the following weekend’s AIAW Region 6 tournament in Grand Forks, North Dakota — these were pre-NCAA days for volleyball — with no mention of a recent battle with the Jayhawks, an omission rendered all the more conspicuous by the fact that KU and Nebraska were sorted into the same pool for the tournament. The agate, however, does feature scores from matches between the likes of Ideal Grocery and Living Room Lounge (8-15, 15-4, 15-11) and Usher Pest Control and El Matador Lounge (5-15, 15-11, 15-6).
It’s even sparser in the Nov. 16 edition of the Journal-World, which has the score between Plymouth Rocks and Bullwinkles (2-1) and not much about the hometown Jayhawks.
The Nov. 17 Lawrence paper, though, features its own preview of the Grand Forks event. And in that article is an apparent confirmation that KU and Nebraska tied at some point.
“KU has lost once to Missouri and split with Nebraska, the Big Eight champ, in previous matches this year,” the brief reads.
So one thing the world can be sure of is that a tie did happen at some point in 1977, right?
“I hate to throw a roadblock where you’re at,” Pettit said. “But if there was any tie, it took place before I was coaching.”
The coach speaks
The playing surface at the Devaney Center, home of Nebraska volleyball, is named after Terry Pettit. Over the course of 23 seasons as the Cornhuskers’ head coach, the American Volleyball Coaches Association Hall of Fame inductee earned 21 league titles, six Final Four appearances and a national championship.
That distinguished tenure at Nebraska began, as it happens, in 1977. And in an interview with the Journal-World 48 years later, the coach asserted that his inaugural season, let alone any other season, never featured a tie against Kansas or any other team from the Big Eight Conference.
“I noticed that when I would look through Kansas’ media guide,” Pettit said of the tie. “I saw it there for years but I never called Ray (Bechard, KU’s longtime former head coach) or anybody. It wasn’t that important to me to point out.”
Pettit said that two-set formats in which ties were possible were largely reserved for pool play in large tournaments. The only time he could potentially have split with Kansas, he said, was in some sort of offseason competition, “when you played as a (United States Volleyball Association) team not affiliated with the university.”
Setting aside the fact that KU had just been in Lincoln for the Nebraska Invitational, Pettit took issue with the timing of a two-set match taking place on a Tuesday: “No team, even in those days, would travel anywhere and not play a complete match.”
“That wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “The only time, even in 1977, where you only might play two sets would be a large tournament on a weekend. But you wouldn’t travel for four hours to play two sets, so something’s missing there.”
He also said it didn’t make sense for a match to take place so close to the tournament in Grand Forks, to which Nebraska would have been traveling beginning two days beforehand.
In general, Pettit said it’s difficult to trust media guides when it comes to statistics reported “prior to the digital age.” He recalled one match against UC Santa Barbara in the late 1970s after which he looked at the box score and found his team had 78 blocks.
“Well, the stat crew had counted it as a block if you touched the ball,” he said.
As for the newspaper’s reference on Nov. 17, 1977, to a previous split with the Cornhuskers that season, Pettit attributed it to a miscommunication.
“Scores were reported by a coach calling in,” he said. “So Kansas may have played somebody else. But even if they played somebody else, they wouldn’t have played two sets.”
He added: “In 1977, when we played a match on the road, I would have to get on the phone to the (Omaha) World-Herald and the Lincoln Journal-Star and give them statistics from the match and some type of whatever. Somebody’s waiting, hurrying to get on a bus or whatever, it wouldn’t take much for somebody to mishear.”
Expungement
After the conversation with Pettit, the Journal-World approached Nebraska Athletics for any sort of perspective on the tie that might never have been.
A spokesperson for the Nebraska volleyball team echoed some of Pettit’s remarks about the perils of record-keeping in the early days of college volleyball. He wrote in an email that Nebraska did not even include a tie with KU in its records to begin with until the 2011 edition of its media guide.
It may do so no longer. The spokesman, Nate Pohlen, wrote, “I’m thinking this tie result may be wiped from our media guide if neither side has evidence of it being varsity competition.”
“If I had to come to a grand conclusion,” he added in a later email, “I would guess Kansas tied Nebraska II (JV team) on Nov. 5, 1977 in the Jayhawk Invitational. And our SID probably saw it in the Kansas media guide and put it into our media guide with the wrong date.”
The Journal-World report on Nov. 6, for the record, makes it difficult to confirm or deny Pohlen’s theory, because it only lists results from the semifinal and final matches. But it does suggest that Kansas and the Nebraska JV team were playing in the same “A division,” leaving open the possibility that they met — and drew — in pool play.
So there is suddenly a lot of doubt as to whether KU ever tied Nebraska’s varsity squad at all, or if it is a mere 0-88 against the Cornhuskers — their varsity team, at least — which certainly explains why most members of the 1977 team might not necessarily remember the result.
There is not a shred of doubt, however, that Laura Frost was named to the all-tournament team for the 1978 Big Eight tournament alongside June Koleber, an accomplishment that is also listed in KU’s record book.
“I have a plaque,” Frost said.
Frost shared an image of that plaque. It includes a now-twice-framed piece of yellowed paper signed by Joel Cox, the tournament organizer who Frost said also served as an assistant coach for KU, and Ruth Lauver, an Iowa State-based representative for Region 6 of the AIAW — the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women that oversaw KU volleyball prior to the NCAA.
A Journal-World story of Sept. 29, 1977 had mentioned Frost’s “steady play,” along with that of Epperson, Dianne Schroeder and the subject of the article, Koleber. The plaque, earned over a year later, provides tangible proof of her performance and a memento of the earliest days of college volleyball.
Laura Frost earned this plaque as an all-tournament selection for the Big Eight volleyball tournament held in Lawrence in October 1978.
Courtesy of Laura Frost