NCAA’s Charlie Baker on volleyball: “One of the hottest sports in collegiate athletics”

Charlie Baker talking in the ESPN pre-match show with Missy Whittemore and Eric Frede

Charlie Baker wasn’t necessarily a volleyball fan. 

But now?

“I have become one,” Baker replied.

Which is a good thing for college volleyball, since Baker is the new NCAA president.

We visited with Baker in Tampa last Sunday morning before the NCAA Division I Volleyball Championship final.

“There are three things that I think are special about it,” Baker said. “The first thing is the quality of the athleticism is purely spectacular. The nature of the game, whether you’re in person or watching it on TV, point by point it’s incredibly fun to watch. And the third thing is there’s a whole series of rules changes that the volleyball community made over the course of 10 to 12 years that really sped up and I would argue dramatically enhanced the competition of the game.

“You put all that together and I think it’s one of the hottest sports in collegiate athletics.”

Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts, was hired by the NCAA last December 15 as his last term finished. He took over at the NCAA on March 1. The issues that he has to deal with on so many fronts are well documented, from paying athletes to NIL to continuing conference alignment.

But we kept our conversation primarily about volleyball. It was a fortuitous time to talk with him, at the end of what has been a most remarkable college season with both attendance and TV-ratings records falling daily. 

“The sport itself is just going to continue to grow,” Baker said. “Volleyball has tremendous upside because it’s grown very fast. Part of the reason why I think it has a really high ceiling is because it’s nowhere near where it can get to just in terms of the audience that’s available to it.”

Next season, with Texas and Oklahoma going to the SEC; Washington, Oregon, USC and UCLA going to the Big Ten; and Stanford and Cal going to ACC, we will be left with a Power 4 with the demise of the Pac-12. 

What happens to prominent volleyball programs not in those conferences, including Creighton and Marquette of the Big East, Western Kentucky of Conference USA and Dayton of the Atlantic 10?

Should there be a split of levels, like FBS and FCS in football, for Olympic sports?

“It’s not something people are talking about, at least not with me,” Baker said.

We asked about the future of the NCAA Tournament, both in terms of TV revenue and sponsorship.

“Keep in mind that for the NCAA, men’s basketball is in one contract and everything else is in a different one,” said Baker, who played basketball at Harvard. “And that’s currently under negotiation. People have asked me what my preferred outcome was and my answer’s always been the same, which is the one that works best for student-athletes and the NCAA. I don’t have a particular construct in mind here. I just want to get the best deal we possibly can for college sports.”

Neither Baker nor his assistant knew of the MPSF — the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation — the West Coast conference that exists for sports that don’t have other conference options, including men’s volleyball, water polo, gymnastics, fencing, artistic swimming, swimming and diving, and indoor track and field.

In the case of men’s volleyball, the MPSF is home to UCLA, USC, Stanford, Pepperdine, Grand Canyon, BYU and Concordia. UCLA and USC, for example, won’t have the option of playing men’s volleyball in the Big Ten, nor Stanford in the ACC, so they will continue in the MPSF.

The thought here is the the MPSF is a model for future conferences around the country.

“One of the things the NCAA, going forward, will have to figure out is how to be a little more flexible around how it organizes all of it with governing structures,” Baker said. “I say that for a couple of reasons. One is when we did a study on the state of college sports last summer one of the things that became pretty clear is demography is going to have a giant ripple across all of college sports. If you drop the number of 18-year-olds by 25 percent between 2010 and 2028, and it’s unlikely that number is going to ever come back up and could, in fact, continue to go down based on the birthrates since then, you’re basically talking about a very different terrain all colleges are going to be working on.

“I think that’s going to make it important for us to think differently about how we govern and how we organize. For years and years, that number just went up and up and up as baby booomers got older and the baby boomers had kids. But that number is now headed in exactly the opposition direction and it has real consequences for colleges and therefore for college sports.

“And this (the MPSF) would fit in really well with the idea that we’re going to have think differently about stuff. You’re not going to be able to presume that everything’s going to be populated the way it’s been populated because it’s not.”

But back to men’s volleyball. 

“There’s a ton of growth in youth volleyball across men and women,” Baker said. “And I actually think it has the potential to have a really serious positive impact on collegiate sports. The one thing you need to have college sports is to have youth programs that are actually creating traction into college sports. And the fact that we’ve got a tremendous amount of growth in both youth men’s and women’s volleyball bodes well for both of them going forward.”

The NCAA Division I Volleyball Championships head to Louisville, Kentucky, next year, and return to Kansas City, Missouri, in 2025. 

Would future sites be excluded from consideration because of social issues? The NCAA has made that statement in the past, in South Carolina, for example, when it flew the Confederate flag on Statehouse grounds. Baker’s predecessor, Mark Emmert, said during his tenure that the NCAA had to be cognizant of laws that are “movements in a direction that are not supportive of what we stand for.”

“One thing you’ve got to remember about NCAA championships is they typically take place in municipalities and communities and many of those communities are incredibly supportive of all of the athletes who show up and all of the athletes who participate,” Baker said.

“Everybody is going to have to abide by our rules with respect to the playing rules, the participation rules and the safety and security rules. We have 1,100 members and they touch all 50 states and what we want at the end of the day is the best experience we can possibly deliver for the student-athlete. 

“I can tell you having been here last year for the hockey championship in Tampa, people love being here. Having talked to some of, but not all of the folks who are here for this one, people love being here … I think it’s important for us to recognize and understand that the student-athletes themselves want us to deliver on the inclusion issues, the competition issues and the safety, security and comfort issues, Those are really what we have to focus on. And we should.”

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