Creighton’s Kirsten Bernthal Booth and her Bluejays primed to take next NCAA volleyball leap

By Leo Adam Biga for VolleyballMag

Could this be the year that the Bluejays break through?

Creighton, the perennial national power from Omaha but No. 2 in the state of Nebraska, just might have the goods to make it to the NCAA Division I Women’s Volleyball Championship.

“Everything we do is to build for the NCAA Tournament,” veteran coach Kirsten Bernthal Booth said. 

To wit, Creighton has its typical extremely challenging early season non-conference schedule before beginning Big East play.

“We’re always trying to set up a schedule to give us our best chance to earn that opportunity and hopefully host (NCAA Tournament matches), and to do that you have to play great teams,” said Bernthal Booth, who is entering her 22nd year at the helm. 

“Every single match we play in the non-con is going to be tough but we recruit players that know that. It’s a grind but it’s a good grind. Our players love it. I know how excited we are to play some of the top teams in the country.”

Creighton, No. 12 in the AVCA preseason poll, returns an impressive core and brings in a couple of highly touted transfers to a team that finished 29-5 last year, which included winning the Big East, before losing to Louisville in a tough five sets in the third round of the NCAA Tournament.

The Bluejays are home this weekend to open the season for matches with the ACC’s NC State, Missouri of the SEC and Drake of the Missouri Valley.

And then it ratchets up. AVCA preseason No. 21 USC and Kansas State both visit Creighton before the annual battle with second-ranked Nebraska, this year on September 10 at Nebraska. The annual battles between Creighton and Nebraska, which has been to 11 NCAA title matches and won five of them, are legendary and must-see early season TV.

Before the preseason ends, Creighton plays Valley favorite Northern Iowa, American Athletic favorite Rice, No. 6 Louisville, No. 8 Purdue and No. 13 Kansas,

Creighton is led by VolleyballMag.com second-team All-American Norah Sis, a 6-foot-1 outside from Papillion, Nebraska, just 13 miles from Omaha. Trust that Sis is primed for a big senior season, along with VBM third-team setter Kendra Wait, another senior. Junior outside Ava Martin was an VBM honorable mention and outside Destiny Ndam-Simpson, who is from Omaha, was on the all-Big East freshman team.

“Norah Sis goes to the back row, you take a deep breath, and you’re like oh, no, when Ava Martin comes to the front row,” Bernthal Booth said. “I think that’s when you become pretty good – a new player comes up and you go, oh no, I’ve got another one coming at me. That’s how we think we can be great – by being strong at every position.”

Throw in Kentucky transfer middle blocker Elise Goetzinger (a key cog on the Wildcats’ spring 2021 NCAA-chanmpion team) and Penn State DS-libero Maddy Bilinovic and Creighton is exactly that.

“We’re not shying away from it. We think we have maybe the most talented team to ever play at Creighton,” associate head coach Brian Rosen said. “We have really lofty goals for what we can accomplish. We return a ton off last year’s team and we weren’t happy with the way that year ended. We want to go farther. We have final-four expectations,”

The small Jesuit university in Omaha is enjoying a golden era in athletics, spearheaded in part by volleyball. Fans sitting right atop the action at cozy, state-of-the-art D.J. Sokol Arena (CU played at a high school gym before Booth arrived) provide a huge home-court advantage. Hosting a regional, as Creighton did last year, can be the difference in advancing or not. Season tickets sold out a month before the first match.

KBB, a three-time national coach of the year (including being the VBM coach of the year in 2016) and president-elect of the AVCA, brought Creighton volleyball from mediocrity to superiority in the tough Missouri Valley Conference. Just like men’s and women’s hoops, she’s leveraged the school’s move to the Big East to position her program into national relevance through enhanced recruiting and scheduling. Creighton has won 10 straight Big East regular-season titles and been to the NCAA tourney 13 times.

Her 470-189 record at Creighton translates to a .713 winning percentage. Her overall collegiate coaching record is 582-230 (.717).

Which is not bad for a coach that no one at Creighton wanted except for now-retired CU Hall of Fame athletic director Bruce Rasmussen. She did come with strong recommendations from Norm Nielsen, then-president of Kirkwood Community College, where she coached three years, and Terry Pettit, the architect of Nebraska volleyball and the Johnny Appleseed for the sport in the state, whose Huskers camps she worked.

Creighton’s culture of caring

Rasmussen, a former college basketball coach, appreciates not only the turnaround Bernthal Booth engineered – the team she inherited won only three matches the year before her arrival – but the culture she’s instilled and cultivated. He said that through it all she exhibits “a joy in the process.”

KBB also built the program while raising three daughters with attorney husband Erik Booth. She speaks of her players in maternal terms and treats them like extensions of her family and quips that when she started in 2003 she was their big sister, now she’s their second mother, and if she stays much longer she’ll be their proxy grandmother.

Current and former players praise her unconditional caring, an open-door policy that goes beyond the office to her home, and high expectations that make them want to do well on and off the court so as not to elicit her motherly disappointment.

“You can tell by the way our kids play in competition that they not only love the game, they love what they’re doing, they love who they’re doing it with, they’re willing to play a role for the betterment of the team,” Rasmussen said. “That’s attractive and addictive to fans but I also think to kids. You can be a great recruiter and you can commit a lot of resources to a sport, but if your product isn’t good then there’s difficulty in maintaining what you’re trying to do. 

“When you talk to our juniors and seniors and when recruits see our product, they see we didn’t over promise and under deliver. They find we are a family and they make lifetime relationships. That’s the culture we’d like to have with all of our sports but certainly Kirsten and her staff have done a great job developing that.”

Said current Creighton athletic director Marcus Blossom, “She has a way of connecting with people.”

Added former assistant Paul Giesselmann:

“Kirsten is not just a great recruiter of student-athletes but a great recruiter of people. She doesn’t sell a thing. She’s genuine. After sitting down with Kirsten student-athletes know she’s going to care about them as people. If you spend four years in Kirsten’s program, forget the volleyball part, you’re going to be a better person and you’re going to be prepared for life.”

Creighton has 19 players on its roster.

“It’s kids more focused on the team than themselves,” KBB said. “What that manifests as is kids who are going to work hard every day, even when they’re tired or they fail a test. There’s the expectation in our gym that I’m going to work my tail off to hopefully get the role I want on the court. But if I don’t I’m not going to destroy things in the locker room and be an energy suck. That’s really hard and we spend a lot of time talking about that because that destroys so many teams.”

Top to bottom, they can all play, which means hard decisions.

“When I was a younger coach I thought kids should buy into any role they have, even if it’s on the bench,” she said. “It got reframed for me. You can be disappointed in the role you have and that doesn’t mean you should give up, but there are expectations of how you handle it. Disappointment’s OK but that doesn’t mean you don’t still work your tail off in the gym every day and you’re not awesome on the bench and in the locker room – all these things that are part of being a team.

“My big mantra with my team lately is let’s do the hard, well. It’s easy to do the good things when everything’s going your way. But what kind of teammate are you when it’s not perfect. Are you going to be able to maintain those things you consider your values in those moments.”

The kids took over at Creighton

Booth was only 27 and Angie Oxley Behrens, whom she calls the program’s “glue,” was just 23 when the two started at Creighton.

“We were kids,” Booth said. 

Rasmussen let them take the reins over a program that got a late start and was mired in mediocrity before their arrival. 

“It was a gutsy move,” Behrens said. “We were both very young coaches. We both loved the game and we were both super eager to see if we could make Creighton a name in the volleyball world.” 

“I don’t know why Ras took the risk on us,” Booth said. “It was a head-scratching hire, there’s no question.”

Rasmussen said everything he was told about Booth proved true. Great teacher of the game. Transformational. Makes the process enjoyable. Addicted learner who wants to be better every day. High character.

He also admired how strategic Booth was in intentionally hiring someone more experienced than her in NAIA Hall of Fame coach Giesselmann and a former Husker national champion in Behrens as her top assistants.

“I’m really diligent on who I surround myself with,” Booth said, “and I think that’s helped a great deal. I didn’t have a ton of experience and so I went and got an experienced, older male coach who was very different from me in Paul. He was way more qualified and a much better coach than I was. He was humble enough to be my assistant. I would say to a degree we co-coached. Ultimately we had some fights because some decisions had to be made that he didn’t always agree with. But I deferred to him a lot. And Angie gave us street cred. She was just out of college coming off a national championship for one of the premier programs in the country.”

Said Giesselman, “She has always been able to recruit and retain great staff around her, especially Angie Behrens. Angie’s been there with her from the very beginning and is still there 22 years later. That doesn’t happen anywhere these days.”

Special help from a Nebraska legend

“One of the reasons we had success is that Ras paid Terry Pettit to mentor me,” Booth said. “That is unheard of. It was transformational for me as a young coach because I can tell you I wasn’t prepared and didn’t really know how to rebuild a program. But I was a learner and given the opportunity to learn I was eager to do that.”

Pettit still mentors her to this day.

“My relationship with Terry has a hundred percent evolved. When I started if Terry said spin around I would have done it, and now I think I frustrate Terry because I argue with him all the time. Terry’s been so great because we see things differently. He’s so outside the box in a lot of his thinking. I’m probably a little more conventional with my thinking and so he challenges me.
“One year I went with a different mentor who was fabulous – a really nationally acclaimed coach who’s won several national championships. But his strengths are my strengths and so I was just getting the stuff I already knew innately, like connection and emotional IQ, so he and I were telling each other the same things.”

Besides Pettit giving her a different perspective, she said, “I think the fact there was money behind it was important because it made Terry invested. So it wasn’t just me being willing to call. He followed up with me and at different times during my 20-plus years he’s come to campus. Sometimes my best conversations with Coach Pettit were when there weren’t problems. We would just talk about things. If a crisis would occur, then you’d talk about the crisis, and that’s when a lot of people will call their mentors – when some major issue is going on and you ask what should I do. But really that mentorship should be things are going well, how do I continue to make it go well.

“I’m a big advocate for mentorship. In the scope of what we’re putting into college athletics nowadays to not be willing to spend a few thousand more for mentorship is shortsighted.”

Quid pro quo

Support comes in various ways.

“We’ve just had great leadership over the years, said Booth, “not only in athletic directors but I’ve had some phenomenal senior administrators that were really supportive through ups and downs. If I ever had a crisis I never felt like I couldn’t be honest with the administration of what was going on. I wasn’t fearful of them taking it out on me. I knew they would support me and try to help me. I probably took for granted that feeling that I could always be vulnerable and not have to be ashamed about it. I know some of my peers don’t always have that.”

Rasmussen said Booth’s ability to connect has won the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of supporters.

“She’s reached out in the community and established strong relationships with some of the more powerful women in the community and as a result we’ve made a commensurate commitment to volleyball.”

No wonder she’s been recruited by other schools.

“I’ve had others say you’ve let us down because we need more female coaches at bigger-name schools. So some have said you need to leave, you need to go to a school that has a legit shot to win a national championship. There’s selfishness in that.”

Besides, Booth believes she can get it done at Creighton.

“From the outside it might look like the journey’s been about getting better every year, but there were ups and downs and mistakes and triumphs,” she said. “Every year has a story. Yeah, we’ve won 10 straight Big East titles but every year’s been hard, every year has had challenges (last year Creighton survived injuries to six players in-season). 

“I love that puzzle of trying to put it together, getting people on board, navigating those hurdles and advancing women. One of the things I’m proud of is that even through those ups and downs we tried to do it the right way. We never came in and said we’re going to burn down the house, run everyone out, and start over. I say this to new coaches all the time: The players currently in your program did nothing wrong so don’t treat ‘em like crap just because you’re a new coach.

“Something important for us as a staff was if we were going to be doing this right for the long haul we might not be good for a few years. But we were. From 3-23 before getting here we were about .500 by the second year. So we did make some strides, which allowed us to recruit – to be able to say, we are getting better, now you can be a part of this and take us to new heights. That’s what we still say to recruits.”

The 2011 turning point

In 2010, Creighton made its first NCAA Tournament, beating Iowa State in the first round.

But Booth said her crucible at Creighton came the next season. The Bluejays went 17-14 that year, 12-6 in the Valley, and lost in the first round of the conference tournament.

“I lost the team. It’s probably the year I learned the most in coaching. I think you learn the most in bad situations. I just didn’t handle some situations well. I  wasn’t ready to make some hard decisions. I’ll never forget, we were playing in the conference tournament and at a timeout we were struggling and I could see eyes looking away from me and I could tell they were not bought into what I’m saying. It’s an awful feeling.”

She convinced Rasmussen to hire two performance sports psychologists, Larry Widman and Jack Stark. Widman still works with the team today.

“One takeaway I tell coaches,” Booth said, “is that players will forgive you. But you need to be able to self-reflect and say I made some mistakes, I’m going to own them and try to do better. Just like they (players) make mistakes. But own it and try to do better and we can move forward. That’s what that team did. Mended a lot of relationships. I learned you have to deal with tough situations head-on. You can’t avoid it. I think that was maybe the biggest turning point for the program.”

The next year Creighton went 29-4, including 17-1 in the Valley. Creighton not only won its first league-tourney title, but an NCAA Tournament match.

And since joining the Big East in 2013 it’s been riding a nearly unbroken string of success.

“I’m not saying our culture’s always perfect,” Booth said, “but I think we know how to navigate the bumps. We really do a lot of proactive stuff.”

Her work with Widman, along with Behrens and others, to create the NeuroFuel high-performance and mental training app her program and many teams now use. Its mindful affirmations and visualizations are as specific as individual positions and team goals. Final four?

“Right now the next step for Creighton is to get to the final four,” Giesselmann said. “They can get this done. They’ve had tremendous success and when they take that next step in their progression the support for Creighton volleyball is only going to grow.”

None of that is lost on Booth.

“If you are at a point where you feel you’ve accomplished all you can accomplish you should probably do something else. Yeah, there’s definitely things I want to do that we haven’t done yet. But I want the team to lead that. The more I coach the more I want them to drive that stuff. That’s me supporting what they’re going to do, and I think that’s the best way that we can get there. They have to drive the car – I’m just there to guide them.

“I’m excited, I think we’ve got a lot of good pieces. So hopefully the coaches won’t mess it up. A lot of things have to happen in the fall – we’ve got to continue to play for each other, not for ourselves, we’ve got to stay healthy, we’ve got to work hard every day.”

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