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.

More than nine months after the Jayhawks last played an official match in Lawrence, and with the Kansas volleyball team now fielding an entirely different squad forged by 14 nonconference matches away from home, KU is finally back at Horejsi Family Volleyball Arena.

No. 18 KU will host No. 8 Arizona State, the reigning Big 12 champion, at 7 p.m. Friday in what will be the first-ever home match for both head coach Matt Ulmer and a handful of freshmen and transfers playing significant roles on Ulmer’s inaugural KU team.

“Fourteen away games has been awesome, very battle-tested, a lot of experience for all of us that we get to use later on in our process, but obviously we’re just excited,” said libero Ryan White, a transfer from Oregon State. “My family gets to come in, we get to see all of our family (members) here and all of the fans cheering for us will be very fun.”

The Jayhawks enter league play with a 9-5 record after a roller-coaster month of matches away from home, including a series of early-season five-set heartbreakers against ranked opposition, followed by a more recent winning streak.

“I think we learned how to fight,” Ulmer said. “I think we learned how to have some adversity and work through that. To be in all those five-set matches against some really good teams in hostile environments, I thought, was very impressive. We had three straight matches there where we were in front of like 11,000 people or whatever that was early on, and I think all those things are firsts for this group.”

The first month of the season provided opportunities for the Jayhawks, many of whom didn’t know each other very well given that several arrived over the summer, to grow closer. It also gave Ulmer a clear assessment of where his team’s strengths and weaknesses lie: “Our defense is pretty good. We can serve and pass. Our offense isn’t good enough.”

“That’s another thing we learned too,” he said, “so now we got to figure out: how are we going to put that together? what can we do differently?”

KU opened its season with four consecutive five-set matches. The Jayhawks stumbled through a 3-2 victory over Vanderbilt, a team playing its first match in 45 years, and then took then-No. 2 Penn State, then-No. 8 Wisconsin and then-No. 12 Creighton down to the wire in succession, only to lose all three times.

“At the end of that, you’re like, ‘OK, this is getting old,'” Ulmer said.

White said she remembered telling the team at the end of the third set against Penn State, “Tough moments don’t last, but tough people do.”

“And that’s something that we’ve kind of leaned on, is how can we be tough in all these moments, right?” White said. “Five-setters, whether you win or lose, are long games. They can end up being three hours. And then how can you — the feel of a loss to No. 2 Penn State at the time — how can you come back from that and apply that to the next game?”

The Jayhawks showed some resilience in beating Bowling Green and a ranked Georgia Tech team at Purdue’s Stacey Clark Classic, only to fall to the host Boilermakers, again in five sets.

From then on, though, they found a groove, albeit against somewhat lesser opposition. KU swept five consecutive matches and squeezed in a 3-1 victory over South Florida on Sunday morning before the Jayhawks were scheduled to take on Creighton the same day.

They did get swept in their rematch with the Bluejays.

Ulmer said he was determined to fit in the South Florida match, even with the inconvenient scheduling. He believes it was a key component of what could ultimately be a top-five strength of schedule by the NCAA’s RPI metric, which might help the Jayhawks host NCAA Tournament matches at season’s end if they improve over the course of the year.

“I think they’ll end up being a top-50-RPI win, so I think that was important for us,” Ulmer said of South Florida. “Obviously we looked pretty tired in that last Creighton match which is very understandable.”

They remained tired upon their return to Lawrence, Ulmer added on Tuesday, “but I got a text message last night from a couple people asking for extra reps today at practice. So maybe we’re OK.”

The return to familiar comforts for an extended stretch — the Jayhawks also host Arizona on Sunday before traveling to face TCU on Wednesday — is a welcome development for a team that Ulmer said only had back-to-back days with practices on one occasion over the course of the extended travel period.

“I think someone told me some crazy stat about how we’d spent like eight nights in our bed in the last four and a half weeks,” White added, “to a point where hotel beds were getting more comfy for us than our own ones.”

As for the opportunity to play before the Horejsi crowd at long last, sophomore middle blocker Reese Ptacek, a returning standout from last year’s team, said she tells her teammates, “It’s loud. Oh my gosh, is it loud, and it’s fun. It’s a great energy. And I mean, the band, they’re so involved. The band knows we appreciate them.”

“Whether the crowd is technically for us or against us, it’s really fun to kind of use that as your energy,” White said. “But I’m such an avid volleyball fan outside of our team as well that watching last year I saw multiple matches of their home games before I even came here, getting to see that environment where the fans are 10 feet away from you as they’re playing. I’m just stoked to experience it for myself.”

ASU is a familiar foe for Ulmer dating back to his days in the Pac-12 Conference, and particularly familiar this season given that two of the Sun Devils’ key players, opposite hitter Noemie Glover and middle blocker Colby Neal, played for him at Oregon last season.

Glover is tallying a team-high 4.72 kills per set, and Neal and Ella Lomigora are averaging 1.38 blocks each. ASU was picked third in the Big 12 preseason poll with three first-place votes (KU was second with four votes), and the Sun Devils currently sit at 9-2 with a victory over Penn State and both losses against top-five teams.