Becoming the president of the Omaha Supernovas in 2023, ahead of the professional volleyball team’s debut, required Diane Mendenhall to draw on the sum total of her experiences from more than four decades in and around the sports world.
From playing volleyball at Kansas in the late 1970s to having her own daughter recruited at the Division I level, from leading a program at Concordia University to working as the first director of operations under legendary coach John Cook at Nebraska, from directing ticketing for all the Huskers’ athletic programs to even serving as the color analyst on volleyball broadcasts — “It was a perfect marriage of all my skill sets that I had gained over the past 30, 40 years,” she said.
But still another of Mendenhall’s skills? “I hire great people and then I turn the keys to the car over to them.”
That’s exactly what she did with the Supernovas on Jan. 16. At the conclusion of the season, she announced, the KU alumna will hand the reins of the franchise, which is now in its third season of existence, over to Amanda Sjuts, a former Nebraska player who worked for Farm Credit Services of America and the University of Nebraska Foundation.
Mendenhall will stay on as a co-owner and adviser and has said she hopes to remain involved “into perpetuity” with the franchise she helped steer through some successful and occasionally turbulent early years. But she feels she has guided the Supernovas to a place where she can withdraw somewhat, spend more time with her grandchildren and watch Sjuts take the team to “the next stratosphere.”
“The reaction’s been absolutely wonderful,” Mendenhall told the Journal-World in an interview on Monday, shortly after her latest lengthy meeting with Sjuts, who has already come aboard as president-in-waiting. “It’s just amazing who you hear from, all the way back to my team at KU, to high school teachers, to just fellow coaches and players that have played for me across my career. It’s been fun to hear from people.”
The establishment of what was then the Pro Volleyball Federation, back in 2022 ahead of an eventual 2024 debut, provided a stateside option for volleyball standouts, who have long had to go overseas to continue playing the sport after college.
The Omaha franchise was to be owned by members of a local investment firm along with artist Jason Derulo. When partner Kirk Thompson called Mendenhall in May 2023, she was in the midst of what she thought was her “swan song,” working at the Lincoln Community Foundation with standard hours, having gotten out of Nebraska athletics.
“We were looking for, obviously, somebody that had experience in the sports world, somebody that had experience in the volleyball world and somebody that had experience in the business world,” Thompson said in the press conference on Jan. 16. “That’s not easy to find.”
It was difficult to process a call out of the blue to undertake an ambitious task, but Mendenhall was intrigued by Thompson’s plan for, essentially, the NFL for volleyball.
“I knew the magnitude of it,” she said. “With that said, the vision was so clear. This model has already its proof of concept within the United States that the structure for major league sports works.”
But why was this, specifically, the right time for pro volleyball in the United States? For one thing, the sport continued to grow rapidly at the high school level, and then Mendenhall said ESPN data suggested that college volleyball was third behind football and men’s basketball in viewership.
“So when you have TV and you have participation, and then something too, if we’re going to continually compete at the national level, at the Olympic level, we have to keep players here and grow the sport domestically,” she added.
The league held its first season in the spring of 2024, and the Omaha franchise brought in an average of 9,656 fans across 12 home matches, making it the world’s No. 1 pro volleyball team in average attendance — a number it upped to 10,925 in 2025.
On the court, the Supernovas swept the Grand Rapids Rise for the 2024 title, then in 2025 earned the top seed but suffered an upset loss in five sets to the Indy Ignite in the semifinals.
KU connections, by the way, have been frequent throughout the league but especially on the Supernovas — perhaps because of their regional footprint, which has them drawing some season-ticket holders, let alone single-game buyers, from the state of Kansas. Mendenhall said it’s not uncommon to see a KU jersey in the CHI Health Center.
That would certainly be appropriate for a team that has in the past featured Laura “Bird” Kuhn as its head coach and Kelsie Payne as its opposite hitter, and currently includes a pair of recent former Jayhawks in outside hitter Reagan Cooper and middle blocker Toyosi Onabanjo.
And of course there’s Mendenhall herself, who was part of the first generation of young women to receive opportunities at the collegiate level. She played at KU under Bob Stanclift in the AIAW era and called it “a dream come true to have the opportunity at KU, and I just fell in love with the institution, the campus, the people. It truly impacted my life more than I could have ever imagined.”
“You have those ties, so whether we’re talking about a basketball game (or something else), it’s nice to have the conversation about KU and have someone that thoroughly understands it,” she added. “Plus, it’s a unique bond that we always have. I treasure that. It’s fun to have them as Supernovas.”
The Supernovas’ existence, and that of the eight-team PVF, took a bit of an odd turn approximately a year ago when Omaha announced, around the start of the 2025 campaign, that it would leave the league upon the end of the season and create a new one — Major League Volleyball. This at a time when the PVF was also facing competition from League One Volleyball and to some extent Athletes Unlimited in an increasingly crowded market, where not long ago there had been no such leagues at all.
(This also occurred several months after, according to reporting from Crain’s Grand Rapids Business, the filing of a federal lawsuit by the PVF’s founders against would-be investors in the league, one that in its initial complaint alleged the Supernovas’ ownership had tried to buy the Las Vegas team through illicit means and to take over the PVF itself. Then the plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed their lawsuit two weeks later.)
What eventually transpired was a merger between the PVF and fledgling MLV, announced in August, one that put the Las Vegas team on hiatus and replaced it with a Dallas franchise and also promised expansion to new markets in 2027.
Looking back, Mendenhall said it was “really an interesting time.”
“I give kudos to the vision of our ownership group, because they wanted to elevate what was then at the time the Pro Volleyball Federation to the next level, and (ensure) that every team, every franchise was operating like the Supernovas,” she said. “They had to make some hard decisions. With that said, they in turn brought along all these other teams that said, ‘You know, you’re right, we need to do this as well.’ As painful as it was, it was (also) this somewhat unified moment that you hope for.”
The Supernovas also in August brought aboard another notable addition in Cook, who besides being Mendenhall’s ex-boss — “I can remember 25 years ago, 26 years ago, Diane on crutches walking up the stairs to the top of the Coliseum to my office. She was coaching at Concordia and talking about being the first director of ops for Nebraska volleyball,” he said in the press conference this month — was a recently retired four-time national championship coach.
“He came to one match and he was just hooked,” Mendenhall said. “He was like, ‘This is amazing.’ He, I think at that moment, just saw the magnitude of what this could be. He’d barely left the venue and he’s calling me … He says, ‘I’d love to coach that team.'”
Coaching ended up being a bridge too far given that he too wanted to spend time with his grandkids, but Cook came aboard as co-owner and general manager in what Mendenhall called a “full circle” development.
The Supernovas, coached by Luka Slabe, are now in the midst of their third season, having opened 3-3. They are still “building this airplane while we’re flying it,” to use a favorite metaphor of Mendenhall’s. Minnesota, Northern California and Washington D.C. teams are now set to join in 2027, by which point Sjuts will be in charge.
“I have huge shoes to fill,” Sjuts said in the press conference. “Diane sets the standard of what the best of the best looks like.”
Added Thompson: “We thank you for everything you’ve done over the past three years, because it’s nothing short of remarkable and we know that you’re going to play a big part in our future as we continue to make history.”
Mendenhall is facilitating the transition and attempting to cherish the moments she is still experiencing. She believes, as she said in the press conference announcing her new role, what Thompson told her nearly three years ago: “This will be the NFL someday — someday soon.”
