photo by: Kate Benninghoff/Kansas Athletics

Kansas pin hitter Grace Nelson serves during the alumni match at Horejsi Family Volleyball Arena on Saturday, Aug. 9, 2025, in Lawrence.

Kansas will begin its 2025 volleyball season on Saturday by competing in the AVCA First Serve event, beginning with a match against Vanderbilt at 3 p.m.

The contest will take place at Pinnacle Bank Arena in Lincoln, Neb., and will be televised nationally on FS1. It brings together a KU team in its first season under new head coach Matt Ulmer, following Ray Bechard’s retirement after 27 seasons at the helm, and a Vanderbilt program restored to action after a 45-year hiatus.

“We’re excited to take the court for the first time together,” Ulmer said in a press release. “Opening against high-level competition gives us an immediate opportunity to see where we are and where we can grow. It’s a great stage to showcase the identity we want to build as a program.”

With most of the familiar faces from KU’s last few successful teams under Bechard having graduated, Ulmer had to add to his roster in a variety of ways over the course of the offseason to create a competitive squad for the fall.

A select few returning contributors were already in the fold, like middle blocker Reese Ptacek, who emerged last season to become the Big 12’s freshman of the year, and Raegan Burns, a key player at libero each of her first two seasons at KU who has continued to maintain a leadership role during the offseason. Then Ulmer had some peripheral players ready to move into the spotlight, like sophomore outside hitter Grace Nelson and senior Rhian Swanson.

But in search of additional depth, he brought in first some key transfers — redshirt sophomore setter Cristin Cline, a Big Ten all-freshman pick last year, from his previous school Oregon, as well as libero Ryan White (Oregon State) and pin hitter Audra Wilmes (Washington). Then, not content with the roster following the spring, Ulmer went to Central Europe for outside hitter Selena Leban, middle blocker Aurora Papac and, perhaps most notably, opposite Jovana Zelenovic, a 21-year-old Serbian international who stands 6-foot-7 and earned a preseason all-conference spot (with Cline and Ptacek) from the league’s coaches without having played in a collegiate match.

Ulmer also brought in Logan Bell, a highly touted freshman from Indiana who had previously committed to join him at Oregon and later picked KU after reopening her recruitment. Bell is an undersized outside hitter at 5-foot-11 — an archetype with which Ulmer has had success in the past — who also has the skills required to play in the back row.

Even with all this turnover — or perhaps as a sign of respect for Ulmer and the players he and his staff acquired — KU was picked to finish second in the Big 12 in the league’s preseason poll, the same position the Jayhawks ended up in Bechard’s last year. They also sport a No. 14 national ranking.

Vanderbilt is unranked. The Commodores have been building their program for years to prepare for this 2025 debut, led by Anders Nelson, a former national champion as the associate head coach at Kentucky. One of their top acquisitions is Kamryn Chaney, a 6-foot-1 outside hitter who was the Ivy League’s player of the year last season at Princeton, where she averaged 4.43 kills per set.

The second half of KU’s time at the First Serve event is a daunting Monday night matchup at 5:30 p.m. against No. 2 Penn State in Sioux Falls, S.D. The Nittany Lions are the defending national champions, as well as the team that eliminated KU at Horejsi Family Volleyball Arena in December 2023 (and added transfer Kennedy Martin from Florida, who played a massive role — she had 33 kills — in eliminating KU there again in December 2024). That match will be televised on Big Ten Network.