Wisconsin volleyball’s Big Ten schedule will look a little different starting in 2026.
The Big Ten will hold a conference volleyball tournament at the end of the regular season, it announced April 16.
“I think it’s something that our players are going to be very excited about,” Wisconsin coach Kelly Sheffield said in a phone call. “I think our fans are going to get excited about it. I think the media will be. … It’ll be some of the best teams in the country just going at it for a title that means a lot.”
The tournament will include the top 15 teams in the 18-team conference. The 2026 tournament will take place at the 7,500-seat Fishers Event Center in Fishers, Indiana – a northeast suburb of Indianapolis.
The first round will be Nov. 20, and the championship will be Nov. 25. The conference did not release the bracket format for the 15-team field, but Sheffield said it will be very similar to the 15-team Big Ten women’s basketball tournament “if not identical.”
“I think the intention is to have an off day in there somewhere,” Sheffield said. “Historically, you look at a conference that has done very, very well in the NCAA tournament, and we didn’t want to sabotage ourselves for that.”
Conferences that already hold postseason volleyball tournaments include the SEC and Big East. Sheffield said a Big Ten tournament has long been discussed, but coaches “weren’t quite sure how it was going to look.”
“The regular season of Big Ten has been great,” Sheffield said. “It’s been very compelling for a long time. So if you’re going to give up three matches, you want to make sure that you get this right.”
With the Big Ten tournament in place, each team will play 17 regular-season matches in a single-round-robin format. That’s down from 20 in past years, as UW played each team at least once and three teams twice.
Matches already announced on the Badgers’ 2026 schedule include the AVCA First Serve against Kentucky on Aug. 21 and Louisville on Aug. 22 at Fiserv Forum and the Big Ten/SEC Challenge against Florida on Sept. 2 and Auburn on Sept. 3 at the UW Field House.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Big Ten to hold first-ever volleyball tournament in 2026
Reporting by John Steppe, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
