In one of his first interviews following Volleyball Day in Nebraska, Head Coach John Cook shared his reaction to the big night in Memorial Stadium with Jayson Jorgensen.
Cook expresses surprise at the huge turnout and says it will be a crazy day of media interviews. Interviews with national media like ESPN, CNN and NBC are all planned.
Coach Cook also discusses how playing outdoors was different but their team adjusted well to the windy conditions.
Watch/Listen to the interview below.
Transcript of the Question and Answer:
Jason Jorgenson – What a night on Thursday for volleyball day in Nebraska and Coach, you’ve had a little bit of time now to digest this. What a party you’re able to throw.
John Cook – It was an amazing night and I’ve had people tell me, including our athletic director, he’s never seen the crowd Memorial Stadium like that. He’s played there. He’s seen a lot of games. And I’ve got several other people telling me that the big crowd never stopped all night. They were so fired up to be a part of that. And that’s what really made it special.
JJ – And Husker Nation stepped up for you. I think you’re going to have the record for a while.
JC – Yeah, we’ll record a will world record Yeah. And that’s just little Nebraska, you know, and to hold the world record for a volleyball match. Yeah, this is mind-blowing. To be honest with you. I’d love to have a comparison for the farmers out there you know guys getting ready to go to the combine and stuff. What this was, you know, what to compare it to, but it’s, I know from my Ropin friends, it would just be doing a nice five-second run, everything goes clean. That’d be comparable. But you know, it’s just it’s still just still hard to believe and today’s gonna be just as crazy. We’re, you’re getting my first interview. And we’re going all the way from you guys to CNN, and NBC. So we’ve already been on ESPN, so it’s just gonna be another crazy day.
JJ – And it’s going to be interesting to see get down the road how this filters through and what this does for the sport of volleyball.
JC – Yes, it will be in you know, I know women’s soccer when they in 99 when they won in front of that huge crowd in Pasadena in the Rose Bowl. It really changed the outlook on women’s soccer and women’s sports and I just think this is going to be another great complement to that for the sport. The other thing is, you know who you know what else will? I know? I was just gonna try to play outdoors in their football stadium. I’ve heard Oklahoma may play softball so it may inspire some other events like that. But you know, I heard today on ESPN. This just beats the football record. Yes. This is the biggest crowd ever to attend something in Memorial Stadium. Think about that. Yeah.
JJ – When you first came up with this idea what what was your thoughts of what you might get for tenants or I mean, you had to figure it be huge, but did you ever think it would be this big?
JC – I didn’t want to do it. Because I thought it would be a disaster. I just think there’s just no way. We had to get you know, concert just you could see we’ve made sure people would come and but again, this wasn’t mine. Yeah, this idea apparently was brought up by somebody who has season tickets. They sent me their seat numbers, and they actually brought it up to me several years ago, like we need to play Memorial Stadium so it keeps coming up and kept coming up. And when people can’t get tickets, well, let’s go to Memorial Stadium. And of course, the final thing was that Wisconsin broke our record. That was like, okay, that’s the only way we could break it back would be to go to the stadium and Treb was the one that really said, Hey, we’re gonna do this. President Carter said, Hey, we’re gonna sell off Memorial Stadium. And, you know, it just kept going from there for governors, like let’s do this. So, and then, of course, you know, school got canceled. So as I said, knowing knowing is canceled school or snow storms and COVID… and Husker volleyball
JJ – I want to ask you a playing outside had to be different. There was a little bit of a win that picked up but what was over what was your overall take on having a match outside in those conditions?
JC – The weather was great. Temperature-wise and humidity-wise, that was all awesome. And it is different playing outside. I thought our team adjusted to what we needed to do to be successful but we had to we completely After the first couple of points we adjusted our game plan. And we were we had to sit with them when that’s kind of what the game plan was. Yes, that with the winds as we said in it gets the win. If football blew around the heaters couldn’t get to it. So our players did a great job of adjusting and I think that was the difference in the match I think and then we were able to pass the ball a little bit lower than what Omaha did. And again a time we got the ball high in the air and created problems for everybody
