We traveled to Chicago for eleven points.
That’s as far as the match went. Last Sunday night at Wrigley Field, where a volleyball court had never been set up before, No. 1 Nebraska played Missouri. My daughter sat next to me, and we were surrounded by a sea of Nebraska red, part of a crowd of 43,067. It was the second-largest crowd in the ballpark’s long history. You could feel the excitement before the first serve.
About ten minutes in, with Nebraska up 11–7, the players were slipping around like they were on ice. It wasn’t their fault. September in Chicago brought so much moisture that the court became slick with condensation the floor couldn’t shed. Officials pulled everyone off. Then all forty-three thousand of us sat there, watching a weather problem nobody could fix.
Here’s what I didn’t expect to be the thing I remember.
The players didn’t take to the sidelines. They grabbed towels. Kids in warmups from both benches, whether they were winning or losing, got down on their hands and knees next to the grounds crew and dragged towels across the floor. Someone brought out leaf blowers, squeegees, and mops. At one point, a group started peeling the big vinyl sponsor logos off the court, guessing that the slippery spot was hiding under the decals. Forty or fifty people gathered at center court, tearing up the decorated parts of the floor, trying to save a game that, even though no one had said it yet — was already lost.
Think for a second about who those kids are. They’re college athletes who learned weeks ago they’d been picked for this: the big match, the famous ballpark, national TV, the biggest stage many of them will ever stand on. For the Missouri players especially — unranked and facing the top team in the country under the lights at Wrigley — this was the story you tell for the rest of your life. They trained for it. They earned it. And now it was slipping away because of something none of them could control.
The DJ had a stadium full of people and no game to play music for, so she kept the songs going. The kids started to dance. The jumbotron found them. And what broke out — between two teams who came to compete and never got the chance — was a dance‑off.
Forty‑three thousand people, a wrecked Sunday, and a full‑blown party.
Over the years, I’ve learned not to narrate these moments to my daughter. I don’t lean over and explain what it all means, because as soon as I do, it stops being her experience and becomes something Dad said. So I stayed quiet. We just watched.
But I’ll tell you what I saw. A group of kids faced the exact thing they all fear — the plan was gone, the moment stolen, and there was no one to blame. In front of the biggest crowd of their lives, they chose not to focus on what they’d lost. They helped. They danced. They said thank you.
Then it became official. Suspended. The floor had won, the game wouldn’t be finished at Wrigley, and no one knows if it will ever be finished somewhere else.
Watch what they did with that.
A few of the Nebraska players walked out to a microphone and spoke to the crowd. They thanked us for coming. They apologized — more than once — for a night that fell apart through no fault of their own. One of them even blinked back tears while she spoke.
Nobody told them to do it. There’s no drill for that. It’s not part of a strength program; you can’t recruit for it, and you definitely can’t fake it in front of forty-three thousand people and a stadium camera. It’s just who someone is when something out of their control takes over the night.
We traveled home late. My daughter was quiet for a while, then she said the game was kind of a bust, but the dancing was the best part. Which — yeah. That’s the whole thing, isn’t it?
The match won’t make it into any record book. What those kids did with what was left of it probably won’t either. But I saw it, forty-three thousand people saw it, and my daughter saw it. That made the drive, the train ride, and the crowded subway worth it.
This Sunday, for paid subscribers, I’ll hand you the usable version of this — The Rainout: What to Say When the Game Gets Taken From Your Kid. It’s a glovebox card for the drive home after bad weather, a cancellation, an injury, or a call that doesn’t go your way — the moments you can’t fix and no one is to blame. It gives you words to use when the game gets taken from your kid. Print it, keep it in your car door, and pull it out when you need it.
Because it won’t always be a dance floor.
I'm a sports parent, same as you — I just read the science so you don't have to, then hand it back as something you can use by the weekend. Free every Friday. This week: what 43,067 people watched two teams do at Wrigley when the match they'd trained for got taken away — and the mindset it models for the things your kid can't control. Sunday, paid subscribers get The Rainout and all the tools past, present, and future.