EAST LANSING — As Michigan State’s volleyball team gets set to face No. 1-ranked Nebraska twice in nine days, the first meeting coming this Friday night at Breslin Center, it’s a fitting measuring stick for a team that’s earned a little buzz.
The Spartans are 14-2 and 4-2 in the Big Ten after Sunday’s 3-0 sweep of No. 20 Indiana — their first win over a ranked team in nearly two years. They’ll tell you there is a joy, fearlessness and belief to how they’re playing.
Moreover, Lincoln, Nebraska, the home of the Huskers, has played an important role in the journeys of and relationship between Spartans head coach Kristen Kelsay and emerging redshirt freshman setter Malayah Long.
If you see Kelsay share a smile with her young setter this weekend, know that it might come from a deeper place than just that moment on the court. Long might even ask for Kelsay’s smile if she needs it.
“OK, I got you,” Kelsay will tell her.
They’ve been important people in each other’s lives going back more than three years, to Kelsay’s time as associate director and recruiting coordinator for Volleyball Club Nebraska, an elite youth club program in Lincoln, where Long was a star pupil. Long also led Lincoln Southwest High School to a state championship in 2023, a title won at the Devaney Center, where the Huskers play their home games, including when they host MSU on Oct. 25.
Kelsay, a setter herself on some of MSU’s great teams in the early 2010s, worked closely with Long during the year she led Volleyball Club Nebraska.
“We established such a strong bond in such a short amount of time,” Long said.
What was a trying year for Kelsay personally was one of important growth for her professionally. After stints as an assistant coach at MSU and Northwestern, she was running the show at VCNebraska, coaching elite players who were a year away from playing in college, while also instructing and overseeing other coaches and teams from the third grade on up.
Three nights a week, Kelsay was in charge of instruction for 200 athletes over 10 courts. She’d set the plan for 20 coaches and do the demonstrations, teach the skills and send them out to run the drills.
“It really gave me my first taste of head coaching, of having that autonomy, having the ability to manage people, having to learn how to say no a lot,” Kelsay said. “I was coaching my own (18-under) team at that time, as well. It was a humbling year, coaching third- and fourth-graders and seventh- and eighth-(grade) regional teams. I learned a lot about myself.
“I would say it’s the year I fell back in love with coaching, because I really had to decide, what do I believe? Not, what does (former MSU coach) Cathy George believe? And what does (former Northwestern coach) Shane Davis believe and how am I kind of regurgitating that? But, like, what do I believe?”
Kelsay was only in Lincoln for that one year, all of 2022, before taking a job as the University of Minnesota’s associate head coach, where she stayed until being hired at MSU in December. But that year in Nebraska was formative for her. It was important, too, for Long, who found a mentor in Kelsay. Kelsay wasn’t the head coach of Long’s team, but Kelsay began to travel with Long’s group and help them, and work closely with the setters throughout the club.
“’I’ll never forget the first match that I coached her,” Kelsay said. “We were in Des Moines (Iowa) and I grabbed her hand before the match and I said, ‘I believe in you. I believe in you.’ And now it’s become something that I tell her and remind her all the time.”
Kelsay helped shepherd Long through her college decision — Long chose Marquette originally — and was an important guiding voice for a teenager that had her mother, Mary, as her backbone, but was still struggling with the absence of her father, Scott, who had passed away unexpectedly six years earlier, when she was 10. Long still plays for her dad, who affectionately used to call her “Mo Monster”.
“I think it has made me who I am today,” she said. “And as much as it’s hard going through that at such a young age, I have grown this love and — he’s my why. Before every game, I close my eyes and I just talk to him. That’s my time to play for him. And he used to always tell all of his friends and all my family, ‘This one’s gonna be different.’ Like, ‘This one’s gonna go out and do big things.’ And I’ve got a little recording (of that) as well.”
She’s done big things since arriving at MSU. Long redshirted as a true freshman at Marquette, sitting behind and learning from All-American setter Yadhira Anchante. When her coach at Marquette left for the head coaching job at Florida and Kelsay landed the MSU job, “the timing was perfect” for a move to East Lansing, Long said.
“Kristen said, ‘The opportunity (to play at MSU) is there, but I’m not just going to hand it to you. You have to prove yourself,’ ” Long said. “(Kelsay) has kind of brought (back) out my spunky (side) out there. It’s been really amazing.”
Long has started all 16 matches this season, averaging 10.28 assists per set. On Monday, she was named Big Ten freshman of the week for the second time, becoming the first MSU freshman setter to earn the award multiple times since Rachel Minarick in 2014. Minarick took over the setter role after Kelsay graduated.
Long has been a catalyst behind MSU’s success so far. But she’s not alone. Another driving force is junior outside hitter Karolina Staniszewska, who leads MSU in points and kills. Staniszewska, who’s from Poland, credits being more comfortable with American volleyball for her breakout season.
“We have this energy that brings us joy and we come into these games fearless, and that allows us to play better,” Staniszewska said. “We play more together than over the last couple years.”
“When I walked in in January, I thought to myself, ‘Wow, she is an elite volleyball player,’” Kelsay said of Staniszewska, who’s one of 10 players who stuck around after the coaching change. “And in a conference where physicality really matters, I knew she was going to be able to have an impact on this team. … She does whatever is asked of her. And that’s really, I think, unique in this changing landscape. It’s team-first, whatever the team needs.”
Kelsay has said repeatedly that she won’t put limitations on this MSU team, even against a 16-0 Nebraska squad that hasn’t dropped a set in Big Ten play. That match starts at 7 p.m. Friday. MSU also hosts Maryland this weekend, at 1 p.m. Sunday. Both games can be streamed on BTN-plus.
“When I look at this group and this team and the staff, there is truly no one else in the world that I’d want to go to battle with on Friday night or Sunday night or any other night,” Kelsay said. “Everyone has their own story, and this team is made up of all of those individual relationships. I think that’s what makes us, what makes this group special, that togetherness and that belief.”
Including one relationship that’s meant a lot for a while now.
“Mo’s resiliency shines through in all that she does and she has a special way of cultivating relationships, and the kindness she exudes in those relationships,” Kelsay said of Long. “ … I still probably don’t know the impact that I had at that period of her life (when we were both in Lincoln). She’ll never know the impact she had on me. But I think it’s pretty special now for that full-circle moment where now I get to coach her on the biggest stage, after all that trust that was built in that year in Lincoln.”
Contact Graham Couch @Graham_Couch. Follow him on X @Graham_Couch and BlueSky @GrahamCouch.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Couch: Surging MSU volleyball preps for No. 1 Nebraska, where the Spartans’ coach and setter spent a formative year together
Reporting by Graham Couch, Lansing State Journal / Lansing State Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
