photo by: Kansas Athletics

New KU volleyball coach Matt Ulmer speaks at his introductory press conference on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025, at Horejsi Family Volleyball Arena.

As much as Matt Ulmer and the Kansas volleyball team might look forward to experiencing a packed Horejsi Family Volleyball Arena this season, they’re not going to get the chance to do so until Sept. 26.

Yes, KU’s first Big 12 match of the Ulmer era, a Friday night battle with Arizona State, is also its first home match of the season. Outside of practices and last Saturday’s alumni scrimmage, the Jayhawks won’t get to enjoy the comforts of home until then. They will instead play in five tournaments, plus a midweek road date at Wichita State, for a total of 14 nonconference matches away from home.

While that’s not usually how a schedule comes together at KU, it’s not necessarily a new arrangement for Ulmer, who said that during his time at Oregon (from 2017 to 2024), it was difficult to procure opponents for home matches.

That isn’t the case at KU, but instead a combination of different factors resulted in the road-heavy schedule, as he explained on Monday.

“We had some commitments that we had to return to,” he said. “So we had to go back to South Dakota, had to go back to Purdue because they came here (in previous seasons).”

Then came invitations to prestigious tournaments featuring some of the nation’s top volleyball programs: the AVCA First Serve, in which KU will face Vanderbilt at Nebraska on Aug. 23 and Penn State at South Dakota on Aug. 25, and the Opening Spike Classic, which pits the Jayhawks against host Wisconsin (Aug. 29) and Creighton (Aug. 31).

“I’m very excited to play in Madison in the Kohl Center,” said sophomore middle blocker Reese Ptacek, a native of Prescott, Wis., during the Big 12’s season-preview livestream. “I think that’s going to be such a great experience for me. Growing up, being from Wisconsin, I remember my dad coached a high school basketball team and we won state in that arena. We played in state in Kohl’s, and so it’s like, I feel like that’d be super-cool, nostalgic-wise.”

In any event, once KU had those top early-season events on the schedule, fitting in a Lawrence-based tournament became especially difficult. The Jayhawks instead head to the home arenas of Purdue, South Dakota and then Omaha over the course of September, wrapping up their nonconference slate with a two-match day on Sept. 21.

“By the time I got hired, it was hard to find that fourth weekend home, the right matches that you want,” Ulmer said.

He said that ideally, KU would spend a week or two at home in Horejsi, but that the team can still “learn a lot about ourselves on the road.”

“We’re definitely going to be tested,” Ulmer said. “There’s a big reason why we went to Lincoln in the spring, to play Nebraska in that scrimmage, to be in those environments, to play a lot of people, packed house, and just to see what a road trip was going to be like. Luckily for us, they’re pretty regional, so I hope the travel won’t be too bad, but yeah, ideally we’d like to be home a little bit more.”