Arlington will host a couple of preseason sporting events this week. We might consider one more meaningful than the other.
Now, to be sure, Friday’s exhibition football game between the Dallas Cowboys and New Orleans Saints means a good bit to the players battling to earn roster spots, but Thursday night’s volleyball event carries significance for the entire sport.
Spikes Under the Lights showcases four prominent college teams competing in a best-of-three set format designed for live television. And if you’re going to do a made-for-TV event, you may as well do it somewhere that has really big TVs. They’ll play the matches at AT&T Stadium, the same venue that will host the following day’s NFL game.
Nebraska will play Florida, and SMU will take on Penn State. The winners play each other for the championship that same evening. All four teams participated in the NCAA Tournament last season, with SMU defeating Florida in a second-round match in Dallas. Penn State and Nebraska each have multiple national titles on their resumes, so these games would represent intriguing matchups for volleyball fans no matter where they played them. But the location elevates the event to a different level.
“We like to say it’s the fifth character in our play,” said Nickole Tara, chief operating officer for Full Day Productions, which put the event together with sports agency GSE Worldwide, “and, to our knowledge, nothing of this magnitude in women’s sports has ever been hosted at an NFL stadium and certainly, what we believe, is the preeminent NFL stadium in the country, AT&T Stadium in Arlington.”
Full Day and GSE looked at trends like rising participation levels — nearly 500,000 girls played high school volleyball last year, per a survey by the National Federation of State High School Associations — and saw an opportunity.
“Some of the ratings they’ve achieved in the last several years, it’s indicative of what we believe is a larger trend: the grassroots level of volleyball really coming up through and becoming core to millennials and their children, a really shared experience,” Tara said, “so we looked out into the landscape and thought, ‘Well, obviously the NCAA tournament is really impactful, but there’s nothing on the preseason side of women’s volleyball, and there’s nothing really that celebrates it in a format that’s made for TV.’ ”
Max, TNT, and truTV will televise Spikes Under the Lights live Thursday. On a Thursday last November, the stadium hosted a game that set a national ratings record for a regular-season NFL game when the Cowboys beat the Chiefs on Thanksgiving. Volleyball ratings aren’t to that level, but they continue to grow, too. A December 2024 study by Horizon Sports & Experiences found volleyball ratings up 126% over the previous three years. Nielsen reported the 2025 NCAA Women’s Volleyball Tournament averaged 666,000 viewers across 15 matches, a 13% increase over 2024. Those numbers might have gone even higher had No. 1 overall seed Nebraska not gotten upset in the quarterfinals by eventual national champion Texas A&M.
The Cornhuskers have a large and loyal fanbase. Indeed, this will not be the first time they have played in a football stadium. More than 92,000 spectators set a women’s sports record in watching Nebraska defeat Omaha in 2023 at the university’s Memorial Stadium. Tara said they learned about where to position their court from observing that experience. The Nebraska event situated it off-center to place it closer to the ticket holders in the less-than-full stadium they expected, which became a disadvantage when ticket sales, um, spiked. Thursday, the court will be centered under a lowered scoreboard video screen.
The Huskers will also play a match this season against Maryland in Chicago’s Wrigley Field. Tara indicated the Nebraska fanbase has already purchased a sizable number of tickets to watch their team play in Thursday’s spectacle.
Getting to play on this big stage may have benefits in terms of exposure for the teams and their sport. It will also benefit them financially. Each program will receive $200,000 for participating, with the winning group earning another $200,000. A few early-season basketball tournaments have started to offer such payouts, but Tara considers their prize money awards unique in volleyball.
“We’re giving away over a million dollars to these teams,” she said, “what we feel most excited about is it’s directly benefiting these programs. These aren’t university-level gifts. These aren’t even athletic-department-level gifts. These are volleyball-level gifts.”
Tara said the schools can direct the money to athletes to fulfill revenue-share or NIL agreements or invest them in other program needs. While direct payments to student-athletes are relatively new (within the rules, anyway), football players have long had earning potential in their sport beyond college. Volleyball athletes have had some leagues available to them overseas but now have options in the United States as well. Indeed, the Frisco-based Dallas Pulse won the Major League Volleyball title in their first season with a roster that included players from all four universities participating in Thursday’s event.
SMU last played in Arlington in 2001, the other schools not since the 1980s (all against UTA). If this event succeeds, Tara’s company will hope to bring these or other high-profile programs back to the city on an annual basis. If they do, it will serve as an indicator that women’s volleyball, and women’s sports generally, are continuing to prove there’s plenty of space in the sports world for more than football.
