Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
SALT LAKE CITY — Women's sports are having a moment in America, and one group wants Utah to be at the forefront of it.
When League One Volleyball, or LOVB, which is pronounced "love," announced it was coming to Salt Lake City for its inaugural season in 2024-25, it did so without a name, logo or flashy branding.
What the league had, though, was simple: a community love of volleyball, and an attempt to grow one of the most popular sports for young girls and in the collegiate ranks in the country.
Now, that team has a name — one of six markets that will launch when LOVB Pro opens its first season in November 2024, including LOVB Salt Lake Volleyball.
To play professionally once required a college volleyball player to head overseas, often to Italy, Russia or Korea, where professional contracts are lucrative.
But now the United States is an option — and Salt Lake, with its grassroots community and a collegiate game highlighted by NCAA Tournament regulars BYU, Utah, Utah State and Weber State, will be at the forefront.
"Not only do we want to be the best league in the world somewhere down the line, but having something sustainable in America gives you the choice to stay home or go abroad," said Jordyn Poulter, the U.S. setter who led the States to the gold medal in Tokyo 2018 and was one of Salt Lake's first pro signings. "We've never had that option before."
Launched over a year ago to now include more than 1,200 junior club programs in 22 states, LOVB will open its first professional season in 2024 with teams in six cities: Atlanta; Houston; Madison, Wisconsin; Omaha, Nebraska; and Salt Lake City. The regular season will begin in January, with the LOVB Pro finals currently set for April 2025.
The league will be one of two new professional volleyball leagues launching ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, joining the seven-team Pro Volleyball Federation.
"There have been many trials and failures of women's professional volleyball in America; a lot of people have tried," said Poulter, a former AVCA first-team All-American at Illinois who played professionally in Italy for the past six years. "It seems like no one has tried to do anything different.
"What makes League One so appealing was that they had spent the last four years acquiring clubs and building this foundation, and then once you have those tiers of investment and methodically planned out some of the specifics to the game, you launch a pro game that caters to us as athletes. It was a big selling point to me, the opportunity to be in front of girls and young women and show them what high-level volleyball is like."
LOVB Salt Lake Volleyball also released its first-year branding and logo, an interlocking "S" and "L" in a vibrant shade of yellow "designated to capture Salt Lake's ability to help people ascend to new heights both physically and spiritually, and reach for the extraordinary," the team says.
The logo points upward, representing the peaks of the Wasatch Mountains that the team calls home and "exemplifying the city's ability to radiate boundless possibilities," according to a team release.
"We were hoping that it wasn't just animals and mascots; that's all been so overdone," Poulter said candidly. "But there's something about starting a new league that helps give this approach more credibility. … Salt Lake City is such an active place, and there's this ideal of raising to something higher, like the mountains that are right at the forefront."
With Division I college programs located from Logan to St. George, LOVB Salt Lake hopes to capitalize on the Utah community's shared love of volleyball with athletes who grew up in the intermountain west.
Both Haleigh Washington and Poulter grew up in Colorado before playing collegiately and professionally, including winning the gold medal at the Summer Games in Tokyo in 2018. But the chance to help grow the game back home, especially in the Rocky Mountain region, was too much to pass up for the Centennial State natives.
Poulter said she visited Utah last summer with some friends, and was blown away with the state's scenery — views she can't wait to experience in representing the region in LOVB's inaugural campaign.
"It was gorgeous," the former Illini standout said. "I feel like Colorado and Utah are similar in a lot of ways, but I think the views in Salt Lake City are better than Denver — the proximity to the mountains is really cool."
Both Poulter and Washington are also league investors and members of the league's athletes council, whose purpose is to "ensure that the benefits and opportunities the league provides its athletes both on-and-off the court foster advancement and support LOVB Pro athletes in their post-playing careers" with the athletes' perspective, and not just prominent investors like Billie Jean King and Kevin Durant, among others.
"The league wanted our feedback, and what our experiences have been to make it the best situation for everyone," Poulter said. "That speaks volumes for our pro teams and what they are working to do. So much is driven around the athletes' experience. … The happier we are and the more care that we have to be a professional athlete is so unique that I've never experienced in my time playing overseas."
