Megan Courtney-Lush was ready to retire. She played four years of college volleyball at Penn State and then went on to play professionally in Puerto Rico, Poland, Turkey, and Italy. After 10 years, she had decided that it was time to come home and move on to the next stage of her life. She bought a house in Columbus, Ohio and was several months pregnant in 2023 when she got an unexpected phone call. Someone was starting a professional women’s volleyball league in the U.S., and they wanted her to play. “I said ‘No thanks, I’m out,'” she told me, laughing.

But the calls kept coming. Columbus would have a team, they told her, coached by Ángel Pérez, former captain of the Puerto Rican men’s national team. Pérez called Courtney-Lush himself, trying to see if he could get her on the court, and she kept looking for excuses to stay home: “I played hardball. I kept coming up with all these random things I would need and they kept saying yes.” Four months after having her first child, Courtney-Lush found herself back on the volleyball court, playing in the first active professional women’s volleyball league in the United States since 1989.

Her teammate Jill Gillen’s story is almost the opposite. Gillen wanted to go pro, but didn’t think she had any chance at it. She’s short (for a volleyball player) and didn’t go to a school known for the sport. “I just thought nobody’s gonna want to take a 5-foot-7 kid from Kansas who went to Arkansas,” Gillen said. But in 2023, her Razorbacks team made a run into the NCAA women’s tournament, and she started getting phone calls and hearing from coaches. “I remember thinking, OK, wow, this is really happening.”

Courtney-Lush and Gillen both play in the Pro Volleyball Federation (PVF), which just finished its second year. But this season, competition didn’t just come from other teams in the league—it came from another organization entirely. In January, League One Volleyball, (LOVB, which the league wants people to pronounce as “love”) kicked off their own professional season featuring six new teams.

Add to the mix Athletes Unlimited—which runs a short-form fall season—and 2025 was an embarrassment of riches for the American volleyball fan. But it was also a year of confusion. Who was playing where? How do you watch? Which league is the one to pay attention to? Which games are worth attending? “Honestly, I’m sometimes just as confused as everyone else,” Courtney-Lush told me.

To make things even more complicated, one of the most popular teams in the PVF announced in January that it would be leaving to start its own new league: Major League Volleyball (MLV). If MLV gets off the ground on its proposed time table, something not everyone is convinced will happen, there will be three professional women’s volleyball leagues in action next January.

As a volleyball sicko, I’ve spent the last two years watching almost every PVF and LOVB game, along with Athletes Unlimited, the Olympics, and the Volleyball Nations League. For this story, I spoke with over 20 people in the volleyball world, including 10 athletes, six team staff, and nearly a dozen die-hard fans of both PVF and LOVB. Nearly everybody told me the same thing: It’s exciting, but also a little bit scary.

At a time when interest and investment in women’s sports is at an all-time high, the battle for women’s volleyball provides both inspiration and caution. Everybody wants to win, but if the wealthy investors behind the scenes can’t put their egos aside and come to some kind of agreement, it might be the players who ultimately lose.

It’s not that surprising that new investment is flooding into women’s volleyball. The NCAA game has surged in popularity in the last decade. In 2023, over 90,000 people filled the Nebraska Cornhuskers’ football stadium to watch the women’s team play. That same year, the NCAA championship final between Nebraska and Texas was watched by 1.69 million people. Volleyball is now the No. 1 team sport in high school for girls in the United States. 

From a less mercenary perspective: Volleyball is fun! The sport moves quickly, someone scores on every single play, and the rules are pretty easy to learn. Some of these women jump over 11 feet into the air, then make reflexive dives onto the floor to save a ball. Almost everybody I talked to for this story, when asked how to get people into volleyball, told me that you just have to show it to them. Fans in the stadiums are glued to their seats, so much so that it’s actually kind of a problem. “Our venue partner wants us to do more breaks so people leave their seats and buy concessions,” Mary Kay Huse, president and general manager of the PVF’s Indianapolis Ignite, told me.

And yet until recently, volleyball’s inherent qualities weren’t enough to attract investment into a professional league. “I always wanted to play pro, and I always knew in my head it was going to be in Europe somewhere,” Aiko Jones, opposite hitter for the Atlanta Vibe, told me. Her teammate Leah Edmond said the same thing: “I for sure didn’t want to go overseas.” Edmond played in Puerto Rico for a year, but she didn’t want to go any farther. “I was just like, we have to find some other options to be able to stay in the States.” 

Morgan Hentz, a libero for the Vibe, did go abroad. “When I was overseas, I felt like I was putting my life in the U.S. on hold,” she said. “And it was really difficult to see friends’ and family’s lives continue on while I just felt so distanced and disconnected from them.”

Volleyball’s surge in popularity, coupled with the general boom in investment in women’s sports, made a pro league an enticing investment for people from all kinds of industries. LOVB started developing its pro league in 2020, and three years later secured $60 million in investments from Billie Jean King, Amy Schumer, Chelsea Handler, Lindsey Vonn, and Kevin Durant. In 2023, PVF announced an influx of cash from investors like Dan DeVos, Jason DeRulo, Danny White, and Joe Burrow. And in 2024, LOVB announced that it had received $100 million more from Atwater Capital, although not all of this investment was purely for the professional side of the LOVB business.

These investors have chosen sides not just in terms of branding and players, but business models. The PVF is a more traditional American sports league, where each team has its own franchised ownership. LOVB is centrally owned: Players sign contracts with the league, and are assigned to teams. LOVB says that in the future it will sell its teams off to owners, but hasn’t put a timeline on that.

LOVB is also tying its professional league to a push into the youth market by buying youth clubs around the country and taking over their operations, housing them under the LOVB Clubs umbrella. In theory, this means players could progress through junior clubs directly into a professional league, all within the same organization. “We wanted to create a pro league that was deeply connected to its youth community and provide this true pathway for women in this country to play professionally,” Rosie Spaulding, president of LOVB Pro, the professional side of the league, told me. This is the model for many clubs across lots of sports in Europe, but remains uncommon in the United States.

These different business models have pros and cons. Centralized ownership can be more stable as a league is getting off the ground. “I think when you’re in the beginning, the most important thing for us is that we’re sustainable and here for the long haul,” Spaulding said. “So we’re not just a flash in the pan, here for a couple of years and then gone.” (This isn’t entirely unprecedented in the U.S. sports world. Major League Soccer has a related structure: the league is a single business entity and team owners are shareholders in the league, but not true franchises.)

Some critics of LOVB have concerns that the league is using fees from youth sports to fund its professional league—essentially taking the money parents are paying for their kids to participate in youth club volleyball, to subsidize the pros. In an interview from June 2024, one of the founding LOVB athletes, Kelsey Robinson Cook, did a podcast interview with her husband Brian Cook, who, while answering a question about how a U.S. league might be able to last, said, “There’s so much money in youth club volleyball, and they’re kind of putting them all under one umbrella really optimizing things, making them even more profitable, and that money is being used to kind of start this pro league.” Spaulding told me that that is an incorrect description of their model: “Our club and pro businesses operate independently from one another, which means our club operations do not finance any of our pro operations.” Other critics of LOVB are concerned that the league buying up club teams constitutes “turning youth club volleyball into a private equity investment,” as Nikki DelZenero, the co-host of the Court Captains Podcast, put it.

Teams in the PVF seem to have a better connection to the places they actually play. “The teams have kind of embraced the personality of their local markets. What San Diego might do for fan engagement is not necessarily what Orlando might do, you know, and it’s just, you can cater to your markets,” said Rob Carolla, the vice president of public and media relations for the PVF. PVF games are more raucous and wacky. There are hype people and T-shirt tosses. The Orlando Valkyries have turned their towel guy into a whole character who does media interviews. The Indy Ignite have a mascot named Pepper who says things like, “I was born with this beautiful, round volleyball head and decided to make the most of it.”

Kevin Pflanger wasn’t a volleyball fan at all until he went to the season opener of the Supernovas, the PVF’s team in Omaha and one of the league’s most popular squads. Tickets were cheap, so he thought “Why not?” From that game on, he was hooked. Pflanger lives in Omaha, which has a LOVB team too, and he went to those games to check them out. But it wasn’t the same. “It feels like a more sterile, corporate environment,” he told me.

On the flip side, nearly everybody I talked to agreed that the actual volleyball in LOVB is at a higher level than the PVF. The league has more international talent and 17 Olympians, a fact that their announcers seem contractually obligated to point out at least 10 times per match. Overall, the play is faster and teams are running more complex offenses. Only one player from the PVF was named to this summer’s U.S. National Team roster—Hentz, who’s been playing with the national team for years—while 14 LOVB players will be there. And several fans told me that they found LOVB games are easier to actually watch on TV, because the league has a deal with ESPN, whereas PVF games are spread across YouTube, CBS Sports, Roku, and Fox Sports.

It’s not all that unusual to see competing leagues at the beginning of a sport’s emergence into professional play. The National League and the American League ultimately became MLB. The NFL absorbed the All-America Football Conference and then merged with the American Football League. The NBA merged with the ABA. The NHL partially merged with the World Hockey Association. More recently, the two women’s professional hockey gambits were forced to merge into the Professional Women’s Hockey League. Even the leaders of some of these teams and leagues seem to know what’s coming. “There will ultimately be one league,” Kay Huse  told me.

In the meantime, some are happy to have a little rivalry. “A rising tide lifts all boats,” Kay Huse said. “Competition is a good thing. We’re constantly making each other better.” Spaulding, president of LOVB Pro, said the exact same thing, and volleyball experts seem to agree. “It’s better for players,” Kelly Wolinetz, of the Court Captains podcast, told me. “You get some competition with salaries and things like that.” DelZenero, her cohost, agrees. “I do think it’s better for player power. I don’t know that salaries would have increased the way that they did in the PVF without the presence of LOVB.”

Most people I talked to agreed that if there were simply two leagues, LOVB and the PVF, the professional game would sort itself out eventually, as it has many times before. 

It’s the third league that really throws a wrench into things.

In January of this year, the owners of the Omaha Supernovas announced that they would be leaving the PVF to start yet another league called Major League Volleyball. “The Supernovas will continue to play their home games at CHI Health Center in Omaha and remain Nebraska’s professional volleyball team,” the statement said, “ensuring the same world-class competition and hometown pride that fans have come to love.” (In case you weren’t keeping track, LOVB has a pro volleyball team in Omaha, which means that the Supernovas are not, in fact, the only pro team in the state.)

Details about the split, the future of the Supernovas, and MLV’s plans remain shrouded in mystery. The Supernovas’ move seems to have been instigated by a dispute between the team’s controversial co-founder Danny White and the league. Volleyball fan forums are full of rumors about exactly why White felt the need to leave the league and take his team with him, but nothing has been publicly verified, and nobody I spoke to could offer a concrete explanation. A spokesperson for the team told me via email that “at this time, plans for next season are still evolving behind the scenes, so it would be premature for anyone from the Supernovas to speak on the record.”

Since the announcement, MLV has made a handful of vague statements about what’s coming. The website is sparse on details, but it claims it’ll have the first serve in January 2026, with 10 teams. White brought some old business partners (like Jason Derulo) with him, and added in a new group of founders that includes Vivek Ranadivé, the owner of the Sacramento Kings, and Kerri Walsh Jennings, an iconic Olympic beach volleyball player.

On social media, MLV acknowledged being late to the party. “Multiple competing leagues are not ideal long term for this sport,” the league said in a statement on Instagram. The post went on, attempting to explain what will separate MLV from the other pro leagues: “MLV provides major league level ownership, major league level venues and major league level pay for players and staff. This isn’t just another league. This is major.” 

Kerri Walsh Jennings, on her own post announcing MLV, wrote, “Here in the states, there’s never been a league ambitious enough – MAJOR enough – to attract the BEST OF THE BEST.” It’s not clear who Walsh Jennings would like to see come to the U.S. to play, given that 11 of the 17 women on the U.S. Olympic team from Paris played in either the PVF or LOVB last season.

The tone of these posts hasn’t gone over well with some players. “Respectfully, this ain’t it chief,” commented M’Kaela White, who played this past season on the PVF’s Orlando Valkyries. “Further dividing viewership and a quality product for audience retention isn’t a healthy approach to attaining a strong unified national volleyball league. PVF and League One are on the right track to develop something sustainable in the next 3-5 years and we need everyone to stand behind that.”

Haleigh Washington, a U.S. Olympian and middle blocker on the Salt Lake LOVB team, turned the announcement into a joke. “Since everyone and their Great Aunt Shirley wants to make a New Pro Volleyball League, here’s your chance to join in on the fun!” she wrote, followed by an ad-libs form:

“This just in! Coming in (year)! A brand new Professional Women’s Volleyball League! The (superlative) (synonym for Pro) Volleyball League! With key investors like (TikTok influencer), (random pop celebrity), (a volleyball player important enough to make this seem legit)!!! Launching in cities like (Midwest city) and (nickname of a city)!!!”

Fans have been turned off, too. “When I saw Major League Volleyball I was ‘Oh my god this is ridiculous,'” Mollie Turner, a Columbus Fury season ticket holder (and LOVB fan) who got into volleyball during the pandemic after watching the anime Haikyu!!, told me. Every other fan I talked to said some variation of the same thing. Pflanger told me he won’t be going to Supernovas games anymore if they play in MLV. “I’m kind of furious,” he said, and told me that he’ll probably be switching his allegiance to LOVB Omaha.

Pflanger might not have to make that choice. It’s not clear right now whether MLV is actually going to get off the ground at all. Starting a sports league isn’t easy. It took both LOVB and the PVF several years to get going; signing players, designing logos, securing venues, finding coaches and local sponsors, and getting their legal structures figured out took a great deal of time and effort. While MLV might have a jumpstart with the Omaha team, many people I spoke with found the idea that they’d be able to launch a whole league with 10 teams by January of next year hard to believe. 

The mystery seems to extend even to insiders. Most athletes are free agents now, and some of them told me that if MLV’s contracts are good, they’d be open to playing there. But their agents haven’t been able to figure out what is going on, or if the league will exist at all. Brooke Nuneviller, the Supernovas’ star outside hitter, laughed when I asked her what was going on with MLV. “It’s such a mystery to everybody,” she said. “I’ve heard tiny bits of details, but nothing concrete. I’m just as curious about it as you are.” I reached out to several people involved in MLV, and no one was willing to comment. One Supernovas fan told me that they’d been getting calls from the team trying to sell a season ticket package for next year. When they asked the representative whether the Supernovas would be playing in the MLV, they were told “that’s the plan.”

It’s this additional drama that has people most nervous. Competition might be good, but it’s not a given that any of these leagues will actually succeed. No matter what the perky Instagram captions say, both leagues right now are precariously positioned. Both have struggled with live attendance numbers. The PVF final’s stands were barely half full. LOVB’s weren’t much better. Taking the Omaha Supernovas from the PVF—the most successful team thus far in terms of ticket sales—could spell trouble for that league as a whole. Bryan McCann, a fan and occasional volleyball historian, told me that losing the Supernovas would be like MLB losing the New York Yankees. Carolla told me that PVF plans to add a team in Dallas for the 2026 season, but nothing official has been announced yet, and he hinted by email that there may be other additions, too. “While I have nothing new to report on that front, the Board is consistently evaluating opportunities for new teams,” he told me.

Lots of fans and players are worried that the sport can’t actually support quite this much competition. “People are just going to be like, ‘Oh, my god, I can’t follow volleyball, there’s all these leagues,'” said Turner.

---

Meanwhile, the actual athletes are stuck in the middle of it all. “I think players just pray that a league sustains,” Hentz told me. “I think the worst thing that can happen would be these leagues stay stubborn and don’t merge one day, or they’re not fully funded. The resources right now are being so dispersed, and my fear is that maybe they all die out.”

The players I talked to all told me that they don’t really care who wins the Great Pro Volleyball Wars, as long as they get to play. “I don’t think really anybody cares about what letters are in front of the league we play for. We just want volleyball to be successful. We just aren’t the ones with the wads of cash,” Courtney-Lush said. She said she also can’t help but feel like the players are caught in the middle of an argument between rich people. “It feels like they’re doing it for the dollar sign, rather than doing it to support women’s sports and bring a product that’s worthy of equality. That’s the most frustrating thing. It feels like it’s all very money-driven. Which is how the world works. But we’re second-tier to their money.”

Logan Eggleston, a LOVB founding athlete, felt the same way. “I think that’s kind of where the people at the top have to maybe put their egos aside a little bit and decide what’s best for our sport, which is to not be competing against each other and instead be competing for one major goal, which is to create great volleyball in our country,” she said.

Eggleston is returning to LOVB next year, and she hopes to keep playing in the U.S. If the U.S. doesn’t work out, Eggleston will go back to Europe and play there. Courtney-Lush isn’t sure what she’s going to do. Maybe she’ll play another season in PVF. Maybe she won’t. In some ways, she’s lucky to be on the tail end of her career. She was ready to retire, anyway. Gillen won’t be staying in the PVF; she signed with a Swiss team just last week, so she’s going overseas no matter what happens with the domestic leagues. Nuneviller told me that she’ll go wherever she has to go to play. “We’re in a really fantastic situation right now with the opportunity to play in the states,” she said. “And absolute worst-case scenario, I go play in Italy, and that’s a pretty fantastic state to be in. I’m not stressed about my career, I’m excited to see how it will all play out.”

Volleyball isn’t going away. But for all the promotional material that the three leagues have generated about how amazing it is to have opportunities to play in the U.S. for players, they don’t seem to take into account how their behavior could wind up meaning that nobody does.