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A college women’s tournaments with a more than $1 million prize pool at stake.
Sounds like March Madness, right? Nope, it’s Spikes Under the Lights, a premium women’s college volleyball showcase, and it’s coming to AT&T Stadium in August.
According to Athletic Business, the perennial women’s volleyball strongholds of Nebraska, Penn State, SMU and Florida, will all compete for the largest prize pool ever offered in women’s college sports.
The event will include a three-hour exhibition airing on primetime television, with a broadcast partner to be announced in a few weeks. It also will mark the first time that a woman’s sporting even that has been held at an NFL venue.
Already, the rumblings are that this event will be even bigger than the August 2023 “Volleyball Day” hosted by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln at Memorial Stadium. The event's recorded attendance of 92,003 was the highest ever at a women's sporting event in the United States.
Women’s volleyball has been growing in prominence. One metric is media attention. ESPN, which covered the 2025 NCAA Women’s College Volleyball Tournament, as well as regular season play leading up to it, reported broadcasts finished up 13 percent year-over-year, averaging 666,000 viewers across 15 matches.
Additionally, the media outlet noted, the tournament featured the most-watched Regionals on and the National Championship match between Texas A&M and Kentucky saw 1.4 million viewers tune in, making it the second most-watched title bout on record and third most-watched college volleyball match ever. Women made up 45 percent of the audience, increasing their share from the prior year.
These are all great numbers — and a harbinger of great things to come this August in Arlington. And drilling down to lower age groups, it’s easy to see where the powerhouse player pool (and the appetite for the sport) is coming from.
The 2025 AAU Junior National Volleyball Championships reign supreme as the largest volleyball tournament in the world, creating a $825.5 million economic impact and consuming 399,262 room nights over the course of 24 days.
The AAU event, a perennial winner in SDM’s Champions of Economic Impact in Sports Tourism awards, is more than half a century old (2025 marked its 52nd iteration) and offers competition for both boys’ and girls’ teams.
Meanwhile, USA Volleyball has unveiled the official schedule and host cities for its 2027 indoor national championship season. The season starts in Minneapolis with the Girls 18s Junior National Championship. Chicago will be a central hub in 2027, hosting both the historic USA Volleyball Adult Open National Championship, one of the longest-running volleyball events in the country, and the Girls Junior National Championship for the 11-13 divisions.
The Boys Junior National Championship presented by Credit Union 1 heads to St. Louis, marking a debut for USA Volleyball in the city. The season will culminate in Las Vegas with the largest of USA Volleyball’s premier events, the Girls Junior National Championship 14-17s presented by Credit Union 1.
In the niche (but growing) market of outdoor volleyball, Waupaca Boatride Volleyball Tournament (another SDM Champion) is the world’s largest outdoor volleyball event, with more than 3,300 teams from 48 states and six countries.
At the high school team level, the sport fares well too. The participation survey for 2024-2025 by the National Federation of State High School Associations placed girls’ volleyball third in terms of number of schools offering programs (17,027) and second in terms of the number of girls participating (492,799).
The sport has also evolved over the years, becoming more technical with longer rallies that feed into spectator engagement. The proliferation of professional options for women’s volleyball (including Major League Volleyball and League One Volleyball, as well as Athletes Unlimited (AU) Pro Volleyball) have created career pathways for highly skilled players.
Additionally, adult recreational, social and club leagues have allowed many players to stay active in their sport following high school and college.
NCAA President Charlie Baker in 2023 put to rest the concept that volleyball is a passing fancy.
“This is not the end, this is a trend. The sport has tremendous momentum with the fan community, but it also has tremendous momentum with young people. Young women are getting into this sport in a big way, and I think that means nothing but positivity and growth going forward.”
Who runs the volleyball world (because they started young)? Girls.
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