John Cook and the Nebraska volleyball team have been making winning a habit for a long time. That has made it easy for their radio broadcast play-by-play announcer to enjoy his job. That, too, has been happening for a long time.
“I love what I do. People ask me, ‘Why do you still do it?” said John Baylor, the long-time Voice of Husker volleyball speaking to Executive Club members at their weekly luncheon at the Graduate Hotel in downtown Lincoln. “Because it has been 31 years since I started, and the reason is I like winning. I think winning is underrated. It’s a lot of fun. Since John Cook got here, 87% of his matches have been victories, by far the highest winning percentage for any volleyball program since 2000.”
Then Baylor launched into the numbers that reveal the success of the Huskers in what he terms the Golden Age of Nebraska volleyball, which he said began in 2015.
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“We’ve been to six final fours in nine years,” he noted. “We’ve been to five championship matches in the past nine seasons with two national championships.”
Baylor pivoted into a specific recollection of how the Golden Age all began in 2015, with the Final Four being hosted in Omaha at the CHI Center in front of a raucous home crowd in the championship match.
“It’s packed. We sweep ‘em (Texas) in three. It’s a seminal moment,” Baylor recalled vividly without notes about the transformative final. “ESPN TV was at the Final Four, it’s one of the first years they covered it. And they’re in the locker room before and after the match, and after the match all the players are dancing and John Cook comes in and he joins the dance, and they dump water on top of him. And then on that, the narrative was dead.”
What he meant by “that” was everything suddenly just changed for Nebraska volleyball as if to say, they had arrived.
“Ever since the 2015 national championship with those cameras running and those views of how much fun those players were having in front of 17,000 folks in red at CHI, we don’t miss out on those top recruits anymore,” he poignantly confirmed.
Baylor pointed specifically to losing a top recruit in 2011 – Haley Eckerman out of Waterloo, Iowa – as she decided to go to Texas, where she went on to be an All-American, National Player of the Year and a national champion with the Longhorns.
He reveled in the 2017 Final Four held in Kansas City, Missouri as Nebraska defeated Florida in four sets, and his daughter and son were there to bask in the sunshine of the Huskers’ fifth title and Cook’s fourth national championship. Baylor marveled about the talented lineup on the 2018 Husker squad, which made it to the championship match with the likes of Lexi Sun, who had 19 kills in the Final Four semifinal game in Minneapolis, Jazz Sweet, Capri Davis, redshirt sophomore Lauren Stivrins, freshman setter Nicklin Hames, Kenzie Maloney and Michaela Foecke, who he said is arguably the greatest Husker player of all.
Stanford won the 2018 national championship over Nebraska in the finals, and then repeated in 2019 with a championship match win over Wisconsin in straight sets for their ninth national championship. Nebraska got a bit of revenge over the Cardinal this past Wednesday night by defeating previously undefeated Stanford in straight sets in Lincoln.
Baylor recalled these Husker legends and described these Final Fours in different cities with nary a note, which showed his passion for what he has been covering for 31 years. Yet, he approached it with a certain sense of incredulity toward what he is watching take place with Husker volleyball.
“How is this possible? How did this Golden Age of Nebraska volleyball happen?” Baylor asked. “A big part of it is leadership. Leadership is critical. In my opinion with John Cook, he’ll never let it fall. It’s really fragile. Florida State football fans can tell you that right now. Greatness is fragile. It looks really easy, but it isn’t.”
Baylor was referring to the 0-3 start to the Seminoles’ 2024 football season as Florida State came into the season ranked 10th. But he offered even more reasons why Cook will not let that happen to the Husker volleyball program.
“The other night he was supposed to come on the show, it was on Thursday night at the coaches’ show,” Baylor reported. “And right before the show started, he said ‘Kelly Hunter is going to be there tonight.’ Then I saw him in the parking lot as I’m going to the studio. I said, ‘Oh come on, just come on.’ He said ‘I can’t, Arizona State’s playing right now; we play them tomorrow. I have to scout them tonight.’”
“That’s the stakes. Those are the expectations. It’s leadership. It’s work ethic,” Baylor said.
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