Culture

Penn State, Louisville volleyball will make history in NCAA championship. Their coaches are why

Published

1 year ago

December 22, 2024

Penn State, Louisville volleyball will make history in NCAA championship. Their coaches are why

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — What’s remarkable is not that two women are coaching for the national championship and one will win a title for the first time in the 44 years of NCAA women’s volleyball. It’s remarkable that these women, Katie Schumacher-Cawley and Dani Busboom Kelly, are the two doing it.

Because they are the ideal representatives.

In this historic moment, as Schumacher-Cawley at Penn State and Louisville’s Busboom Kelly match wits before a sold-out KFC Yum! Center and a national ABC audience on Sunday at 3 p.m., they are the embodiment of what it takes to get to the top in an industry dominated by men.

Eighteen of the 20 winningest coaches in Division I women’s volleyball history are men.

“It’s going to be awesome for the sport to get this monkey off its back and move on from this, where it’s not historic that a woman wins,” said Busboom Kelly, 39, in her eighth season and making a second trip to the national championship match with the Cardinals. “It’s just a regular thing.”

Penn State (34-2) and Louisville (30-5) reflect their coaches’ drive and resilience. They won national semifinal matches on Thursday against Nebraska and Pittsburgh, respectively, in dramatic fashion.

Schumacher-Cawley and Busboom Kelly both coached with a steady hand. They fostered confidence from the sideline as their squads’ manufactured comebacks against opponents considered to rank first and second nationally in talent, depth and championship-level experience.

GO DEEPER

Penn State, Louisville set to meet for women’s volleyball national title

The Nittany Lions pulled a five-set reverse sweep, fighting off two match points for Nebraska in the fourth set.

At the start of the decisive fifth set, junior libero Gillian Grimes heard a voice of reassurance in the Penn State huddle: “We’re made for this.” The phrase didn’t come from Schumacher-Cawley. But she is why it was spoken.

Louisville players faced pressure all season to earn a spot in the Final Four at home. As stress rose when Pitt won the opening set and took the lead in the second, Busboom Kelly implored the Cardinals to keep their composure.

“This is going to start to work,” she said.

Without star attacker Anna DeBeer, the senior was injured two points into the fourth set, they swarmed Pitt after turning back three set points for the Panthers in the third.

In short, Penn State and Louisville refused to go away. They kept taking huge swings. They played to win.

“We’re not talking about losing ever,” Penn State outside hitter Jess Mruzik. “We’re never counting ourselves out, no matter how big of a deficit we’re facing.”

In matches played in front of an NCAA-postseason record crowd of 21,726, Penn State and Louisville were the tougher teams.

Is it any surprise, considering the coaches?

“Women are tough,” said Nebraska coach John Cook, who’s won four national championships. “And those two are really tough. Look at them as players. They both won national championships, so this isn’t a fluke. These guys are winners. They’re great competitors. And their teams play like it.”

Schumacher-Cawley, 44, is a Chicago brand of tough. She grew up in the city and starred in multiple sports at Mother McAuley High. She played at Penn State, earned two All-America honors and won a national championship, the school’s first in women’s volleyball, in 1999 for coach Russ Rose.

Rose won six more titles. He’s the all-time leader in championships and wins among Division I coaches. In 2008, Schumacher-Cawley was inducted into the Chicagoland Hall of Fame in a class alongside Dick Butkus, Gale Sayers and Andre Dawson.

She ran the program at Illinois-Chicago for eight seasons and returned to Penn State to work for Rose in 2018 — four years after the Nittany Lions’ most recent Final Four appearance until last week.

Schumacher Cawley took over when Rose retired in 2022.

“Following Russ Rose, to take the team back to the Final Four in just three years,” Busboom Kelly said, “take being a man or woman out of it, that’s an amazing accomplishment.”

Early in her third season this fall, Schumacher-Cawley revealed a Stage 2 breast cancer diagnosis and she began chemotherapy. She lost her hair but did not miss a practice with her team.

“We’re obviously wanting to do this for her because she’s been so amazing throughout this season,” said Mruzik, who hammered a match-best 26 kills against Nebraska. “So that gritty five-set win helped put another brick into the piece that we’re trying to build this season.”

Schumacher-Cawley deflects questions about her health and the gender issue in coaching.

“I’m just really excited to represent Penn State,” she said.

Maybe it’ll sink in, she said, the magnitude of two women on the bench, both in charge with a trophy on the court, when they step out under the lights Sunday.

“I’m proud of this team,” Schumacher-Cauley said. “I think I’ve said that every day. I’m proud of their fight.”

The fight transcends volleyball.

Louisville coach Dani Busboom Kelly was the 2021 AVCA national coach of the year. (Sam Upshaw Jr. / Courier Journal / USA Today via Imagn Images)

When Busboom Kelly took over at Louisville in 2017, she doubled the Cardinals’ win total, from 12 to 24, in one season.

In 2019, Louisville advanced to the round of eight for the first time. In 2021, Busboom Kelly was named the national coach of the year as the Cardinals went undefeated until the Final Four, losing in five sets against Wisconsin. A year later, Texas beat Louisville for the national championship.

“She’s led one of the great turnarounds in any college volleyball program,” Cook said.

Busboom Kelly played for Cook at Nebraska from 2003 to 2006. He recruited her off a farm near Cortland Neb. She was a multi-sport star at tiny Adams Freeman High School.

In college, she moved from setter to libero and helped spark the Huskers, alongside future Olympians Jordan Larson and Sarah Pavan, to a national championship in 2006. She won another title with Cook and the Huskers as an assistant coach in 2015.

A year later, she took over at Louisville.

“I hope people appreciate what she’s done here,” Cook said.

Louisville fans appreciate Busboom Kelly, based on the reception Thursday that she and the Cardinals received.

“I think the last time I was on the mic talking about Dani, I called her a badass,” Louisville middle blocker Phekran Kong said Friday at the news conference to preview the championship. “So I’m going to double down on that one. Because she’s legit.”

In the fourth set on Thursday, after DeBeer left with the injury that could keep the senior All-American out of the championship match, middle blocker Cara Cresse promised Busboom Kelly that she would deliver two blocks.

Cresse produced. Momentum flipped. The Panthers fell apart late in the match. Even sophomore opposite hitter Olivia Babcock, crowned Friday as the national player of the year, felt the pressure. The Cardinals embraced it.

“This is for all the people who doubted us,” Louisville outside hitter Charitie Luper said.

Her coach looked on and smiled.

More than to shatter a glass ceiling on Sunday, Busbom Kelly said, she’s excited that a woman will coach her team to the national championship so that athletic directors and future players who might go into coaching understand that it can be done.

“It’s more just being really proud that we can be role models,” she said, “and hopefully blazing new trails.”

(Top photo of Schumacher-Cawley: Dan Rainville / USA Today via Imagn Images

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Culture

Video: 250 Years of Jane Austen, in Objects

Published

2 weeks ago

December 18, 2025

Press Room

Video: 250 Years of Jane Austen, in Objects

new video loaded: 250 Years of Jane Austen, in Objects

To capture Jane Austen’s brief life and enormous impact, editors at The New York Times Book Review assembled a sampling of the wealth, wonder and weirdness she has brought to our lives.

By Jennifer Harlan, Sadie Stein, Claire Hogan, Laura Salaberry and Edward Vega

December 18, 2025

Culture

Try This Quiz and See How Much You Know About Jane Austen

Published

3 weeks ago

December 16, 2025

Press Room

Try This Quiz and See How Much You Know About Jane Austen

“Window seat with garden view / A perfect nook to read a book / I’m lost in my Jane Austen…” sings Kristin Chenoweth in “The Girl in 14G” — what could be more ideal? Well, perhaps showing off your literary knowledge and getting a perfect score on this week’s super-size Book Review Quiz Bowl honoring the life, work and global influence of Jane Austen, who turns 250 today. In the 12 questions below, tap or click your answers to the questions. And no matter how you do, scroll on to the end, where you’ll find links to free e-book versions of her novels — and more.

Culture

Revisiting Jane Austen’s Cultural Impact for Her 250th Birthday

Published

3 weeks ago

December 16, 2025

Press Room

Revisiting Jane Austen’s Cultural Impact for Her 250th Birthday

On Dec. 16, 1775, a girl was born in Steventon, England — the seventh of eight children — to a clergyman and his wife. She was an avid reader, never married and died in 1817, at the age of 41. But in just those few decades, Jane Austen changed the world.

Her novels have had an outsize influence in the centuries since her death. Not only are the books themselves beloved — as sharply observed portraits of British society, revolutionary narrative projects and deliciously satisfying romances — but the stories she created have so permeated culture that people around the world care deeply about Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, even if they’ve never actually read “Pride and Prejudice.”

With her 250th birthday this year, the Austen Industrial Complex has kicked into high gear with festivals, parades, museum exhibits, concerts and all manner of merch, ranging from the classily apt to the flamboyantly absurd. The words “Jane mania” have been used; so has “exh-Aust-ion.”

How to capture this brief life, and the blazing impact that has spread across the globe in her wake? Without further ado: a mere sampling of the wealth, wonder and weirdness Austen has brought to our lives. After all, your semiquincentennial doesn’t come around every day.

By ‘A Lady’

Jane Austen’s House, Chawton, England

Austen published just four novels in her lifetime: “Sense and Sensibility” (1811), “Pride and Prejudice” (1813), “Mansfield Park” (1814) and “Emma” (1815). All of them were published anonymously, with the author credited simply as “A Lady.” (If you’re in New York, you can see this first edition for yourself at the Grolier Club through Feb. 14.)

Where the Magic Happened

Janice Chung for The New York Times

Placed near a window for light, this diminutive walnut table was, according to family lore, where the author did much of her writing. It is now in the possession of the Jane Austen Society.

An Iconic Accessory

Jane Austen’s House, Chawton, England

Few of Austen’s personal artifacts remain, contributing to the author’s mystique. One of them is this turquoise ring, which passed to her sister-in-law and then her niece after her death. In 2012, the ring was put up for auction and bought by the “American Idol” champion Kelly Clarkson. This caused quite a stir in England; British officials were loath to let such an important cultural artifact leave the country’s borders. Jane Austen’s House, the museum now based in the writer’s Hampshire home, launched a crowdfunding campaign to Bring the Ring Home and bought the piece from Clarkson. The real ring now lives at the museum; the singer has a replica.

Austen Onscreen

Since 1940, when Austen had a bit of a moment and Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier starred in MGM’s rather liberally reinterpreted “Pride and Prejudice,” there have been more than 20 international adaptations of Austen’s work made for film and TV (to say nothing of radio). From the sublime (Emma Thompson’s Oscar-winning “Sense and Sensibility”) to the ridiculous (the wholly gratuitous 2022 remake of “Persuasion”), the high waists, flickering firelight and double weddings continue to provide an endless stream of debate fodder — and work for a queen’s regiment of British stars.

Jane Goes X-Rated

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

The rumors are true: XXX Austen is a thing. “Jane Austen Kama Sutra,” “Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen” and enough slash fic and amateur porn to fill Bath’s Assembly Rooms are just the start. Purists may never recover.

A Lady Unmasked

Jane Austen’s House, Chawton, England

Austen’s final two completed novels, “Northanger Abbey” and “Persuasion,” were published after her death. Her brother Henry, who oversaw their publication, took the opportunity to give his sister the recognition he felt she deserved, revealing the true identity of the “Lady” behind “Pride and Prejudice,” “Emma,” etc. in a biographical note. “The following pages are the production of a pen which has already contributed in no small degree to the entertainment of the public,” he wrote, extolling his sister’s imagination, good humor and love of dancing. Still, “no accumulation of fame would have induced her, had she lived, to affix her name to any productions of her pen.”

Wearable Tributes

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Jane Austen fan wants to find other Jane Austen fans, and what better way to advertise your membership in that all-inclusive club than with a bit of merch — from the subtle and classy to the gloriously obscene.

The Austen Literary Universe

Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York Times

On the page, there is no end to the adventures Austen and her characters have been on. There are Jane Austen mysteries, Jane Austen vampire series, Jane Austen fantasy adventures, Jane Austen Y.A. novels and, of course, Jane Austen romances, which transpose her plots to a remote Maine inn, a Greenwich Village penthouse and the Bay Area Indian American community, to name just a few. You can read about Austen-inspired zombie hunters, time-traveling hockey players, Long Island matchmakers and reality TV stars, or imagine further adventures for some of your favorite characters. (Even the obsequious Mr. Collins gets his day in the sun.)

A Botanical Homage

Created in 2017 to mark the 200th anniversary of Austen’s death, the “Jane Austen” rose is characterized by its intense orange color and light, sweet perfume. It is bushy, healthy and easy to grow.

Aunt Jane

Jane Austen’s House, Chawton, England

Hoping to cement his beloved aunt’s legacy, Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh published this biography — a rather rosy portrait based on interviews with family members — five decades after her death. The book is notable not only as the source (biased though it may be) of many of the scant facts we know about her life, but also for the watercolor portrait by James Andrews that serves as its frontispiece. Based on a sketch by Cassandra, this depiction of Jane is softer and far more winsome than the original: Whether that is due to a lack of skill on her sister’s part or overly enthusiastic artistic license on Andrews’s, this is the version of Austen most familiar to people today.

Cultural Currency

Steve Parsons/Associated Press

In 2017, the Bank of England released a new 10-pound note featuring Andrews’s portrait of Austen, as well as a line from “Pride and Prejudice”: “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!” Austen is the third woman — other than the queen — to be featured on British currency, and the only one currently in circulation.

In the Trenches

During World War I and World War II, British soldiers were given copies of Austen’s works. In his 1924 story “The Janeites,” Rudyard Kipling invoked the grotesque contrasts — and the strange comfort — to be found in escaping to Austen’s well-ordered world amid the horrors of trench warfare. As one character observes, “There’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place.”

Baby Janes

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

You’re never too young to learn to love Austen — or that one’s good opinion, once lost, may be lost forever.

The Austen Industrial Complex

Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York Times

Maybe you’ve not so much as seen a Jane Austen meme, let alone read one of her novels. No matter! Need a Jane Austen finger puppet? Lego? Magnetic poetry set? Lingerie? Nameplate necklace? Plush book pillow? License plate frame? Bath bomb? Socks? Dog sweater? Whiskey glass? Tarot deck? Of course you do! And you’re in luck: What a time to be alive.

Around the Globe

Goucher College Special Collections & Archives, Alberta H. and Henry G. Burke Collection; via The Morgan Library & Museum

Austen’s novels have been translated into more than 40 languages, including Polish, Finnish, Chinese and Farsi. There are active chapters of the Jane Austen Society, her 21st-century fan club, throughout the world.

Playable Persuasions

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

In Austen’s era, no afternoon tea was complete without a rousing round of whist, a trick-taking card game played in two teams of two. But should you not be up on your Regency amusements, you can find plenty of contemporary puzzles and games with which to fill a few pleasant hours, whether you’re piecing together her most beloved characters or using your cunning and wiles to land your very own Mr. Darcy.

#SoJaneAusten

The wild power of the internet means that many Austen moments have taken on lives of their own, from Colin Firth’s sopping wet shirt and Matthew Macfadyen’s flexing hand to Mr. Collins’s ode to superlative spuds and Mr. Knightley’s dramatic floor flop. The memes are fun, yes, but they also speak to the universality of Austen’s writing: More than two centuries after her books were published, the characters and stories she created are as relatable as ever.

Bonnets Fit for a Bennett

Peter Flude for The New York Times

For this summer’s Grand Regency Costumed Promenade in Bath, England — as well as the myriad picnics, balls, house parties, dinners, luncheons, teas and fetes that marked the anniversary — seamstresses, milliners, mantua makers and costume warehouses did a brisk business, attiring the faithful in authentic Regency finery. And that’s a commitment: A bespoke, historically accurate bonnet can easily run to hundreds of dollars.

Most Ardently, Jane

The Morgan Library & Museum

Austen was prolific correspondent, believed to have written thousands of letters in her lifetime, many to her sister, Cassandra. But in an act that has frustrated biographers for centuries, upon Jane’s death, Cassandra protected her sister’s privacy — and reputation? — by burning almost all of them, leaving only about 160 intact, many heavily redacted. But what survives is filled with pithy one-liners. To wit: “I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”

Stage and Sensibility

Austen’s works have been adapted numerous times for the stage. Some plays (and musicals) hew closely to the original text, while others — such as Emily Breeze’s comedic riff on “Pride and Prejudice,” “Are the Bennet Girls OK?”, which is running at New York City’s West End Theater through Dec. 21 — use creative license to explore ideas of gender, romance and rage through a contemporary lens.

Austen 101

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Austen remains a reliable fount of academic scholarship; recent conference papers have focused on the author’s enduring global reach, the work’s relationship to modern intersectionality, digital humanities and “Jane Austen on the Cheap.” And as one professor told our colleague Sarah Lyall of the Austen amateur scholarship hive, “Woe betide the academic who doesn’t take them seriously.”