ADAMS — Lexi Holland has a not-so-secret weapon when she needs to motivate her players. The Freeman High School girls volleyball coach jumps 26 years in the past, to the district’s first state championship and one player in particular: Dani Busboom Kelly.
“Her jersey’s in our gym,” says Holland, who also teaches second grade in the district 30 minutes southeast of Lincoln. “We hang her picture up sometimes and (ask), ‘If Dani was here watching, how would you practice?’”
Busboom Kelly, a former Husker player who became the team’s head coach earlier this year, looms large in Adams, a farming community of 604 residents.. That was true even before she ascended to the top job with the perennial powerhouse in her home state.
Busboom Kelly’s mother, Bonnie Busboom, still recalls the group of trick-or-treaters the Halloween after her daughter led a once-flailing University of Louisville program to its first of two NCAA championship appearances.
“That’s the year they were Louisville volleyball players,” Bonnie Busboom said.
Now that she’s leading the preseason No. 1 Huskers? It’s hard to escape talk of DBK, as she’s known, in her hometown.
“We use her a lot in our gym, and I think it’s just good motivation,” Holland said. “Chase your dreams because you never know where they’re going to take you.”
A pig pen full of poop
Laura Kroese Francke and Busboom Kelly had plenty in common growing up just outside of Adams.
The lifelong friends each possessed a strong work ethic tied to their farm-kid roots. Among young Dani’s many chores: rounding up pigs for castration. (She was spared having to perform the procedure.)
“(I remember) going into the pig pen and getting full of poop,” Busboom Kelly said. “I remember doing that and mowing the yard, the chores that are stuck in my brain. Mowing took four hours.”
They also shared “the love for sports and competition,” Francke said. They credit their dads for instilling that passion.
They were teammates in all the sports they played — volleyball, softball, basketball, track and field. Francke was behind the plate for the town softball team. Dani was one of the pitchers.
“When she’d come pitch, (it was) a little bit different speed coming at me. She was good.”
When she committed to play volleyball at Nebraska, a photo of a smiling Dani flanked by her parents ran in the Lincoln Journal Star under the headline “NU’s fab four.” Coach John Cook told the newspaper that Busboom Kelly had a good chance to play as a freshman.
That senior year, she scored 27 points to help the Freeman girls win a state basketball championship and then won a state title in hurdles.
“Growing up, you always knew about Dani Busboom,” said Holland, the Freeman volleyball coach. “(You) followed her game, followed what she was doing, so it’s fun being here and getting to show the girls her legacy.”
That legacy included two NCAA championships with the Huskers: 2006 as a player and 2015 as an assistant coach. Busboom Kelly, who worked as an assistant at the University of Tennessee and the University of Louisville before joining the Huskers’ coaching staff, seemed a logical successor to Cook when the time came.
Then Louisville called.
Cardinal rules
The many miles separating Adams, Nebraska, and Louisville, Kentucky, didn’t diminish the hometown excitement when Busboom Kelly landed her first head coaching job after the 2016 season. Neither did the scope of the challenge before her: The Cardinals had finished that season with a 12-18 record.
Her first season, U of L went 24-7 and made it to the NCAA tournament. By year three, the team made it to the Elite Eight after pulling off the upset of the tournament by knocking off perennial power Texas. Then, in 2021, she coached Louisville to a perfect 28-0 regular season record, becoming the first woman head coach in NCAA Division I history to lead her team to an undefeated regular season.
When the Cardinals advanced from their second straight Final Four in 2022 to the national championship game in Omaha, Freeman elementary students sent a video recorded in the same school gym where Busboom Kelly once played.
“C-A-R-D-S. Cards! Good luck Coach Busboom Kelly!” the students scream.
The video went viral on Twitter.
“First of all, I’m really impressed by their choreography,” Busboom Kelly said before the title game. “It was spot on. The technology’s gotten a lot better than when I was at Freeman.”
The longer DBK’s successful Louisville tenure lasted, the more attached she became to her adopted home.
“One hundred percent,” Busboom Kelly said. “Louisville’s a really fun city and it really fit my personality and my husband’s personality.”
Only once in her eight years as the Cardinals’ head coach did she miss the Kentucky Derby, the city’s signature sporting event, and that was because she had just given birth to her first son.
Bonnie Busboom sensed that growing attachment.
“I was worried that there was going to be less and less chance of her coming back,” she says. “They were growing such deep roots there friends-wise.”
That attachment was nearly locked in. A clause in Busboom Kelly’s six-year contract extension signed after the 2021 season required Busboom Kelly to pay Louisville a buyout fee if she took another job, with one exception — Nebraska.
But after making it to the national championship match in 2024, the Cardinals wanted to extend Busboom Kelly’s contract again. This time, there’d be no Nebraska exception.
“I knew if I’d signed the contract with Louisville, I’d be there for at least a few more years minimum,” Busboom Kelly said. “Maybe forever.”
As contract talks progressed, a stunning development started rapidly unfolding behind the scenes 700 miles away.
The ‘top secret’ transition plan
Busboom Kelly was back in her home state on Jan. 24 watching a LOVB Omaha match when she ran into Cook.
One day earlier, the longtime Nebraska coach had informed Husker Athletics Director Troy Dannen that he planned to retire. The two men started talking about a transition plan — “top secret-type stuff, which was kind of fun,” Cook said.
At the LOVB match, Cook suggested Busboom Kelly get to know Dannen. “That’s when I knew that John was getting more serious about retiring,” she said.
The two met the next day.
Bonnie Busboom recalls her daughter saying the meeting was positive, “but she didn’t say, ‘I’ll be the next coach.’”
On Monday, Dannen offered Busboom Kelly the job. They kept it quiet until Wednesday.
“I was really trying to protect the programs — Louisville and Nebraska,” Busboom Kelly said. “I wanted to make sure that nothing got out before both schools had the opportunity to do it the right way.”
Back home in Adams, the family “had to keep it really, really quiet those few days,” Bonnie Busboom said. “Luckily, it wasn’t too many days.”
Eventually, the news rapidly spread across the community.
Few were as relieved as Francke, who had made several trips to Louisville during her friend’s time there, including during the 2024 Final Four in Louisville, where both the Cardinals and the Huskers played. When Nebraska lost to eventual champion Penn State in the semifinals, there was no question about who the Franckes were backing.
“Just like myself and so many of us who knew Dani growing up in our small community, we will always support our own,” Francke said.
The Adams family
The email landed in the inboxes of the Freeman school secretaries at 10:51 a.m. Jan. 31 — two days after Nebraska announced Busboom Kelly’s hiring.
Bailey Schlotfeld, the Huskers’ director of marketing and fan experience, extended an invitation to the community for Busboom Kelly’s Devaney Center welcoming ceremony on Feb. 6. The university was willing to send two chartered buses and needed to know how many people would be interested.
On an already hectic Friday, the email was forwarded to Freeman Superintendent Andrew Havelka.
That day, there was an early dismissal, the task of hosting an afternoon wrestling tournament and ongoing interviews with language arts teacher candidates. Havelka met with the two school principals and asked one simple question: “How can we pull this off?”
They got to work.
“We joke after the fact that if you have it be about Dani and invite the community, ‘Be careful what you wish for,’” Havelka said with a laugh.
Freeman Assistant Athletics Director Kristin Kroeker designed a group T-shirt during her last class of the day, drawing from previous experience knowing how much pride the town takes when Freeman teams advance to state title games.
But there would be nothing like this.
The Freeman school district booked a third bus of its own to handle the overflow from the two UNL buses. The district sold 700 T-shirts.
The Freeman contingent in the lower section of the Devaney Center that day likely exceeded the population of Adams. The students got a special address from the Husker AD.
“Dani sat in your desk, she walked your halls, she played in your gym,” Dannen said. “What she has become is the dream of every high school student: To be great at what you wanna be. And the opportunity came at your school.”
The Busboom presence
Families trickled into the Freeman gymnasium on a Tuesday night just before the start of the school year. Back-to-school night is a tradition in the district, which educates nearly 500 K-12 students on one campus in Adams.
During seventh-grade orientation, the first teacher to introduce herself had a familiar name: Karli Busboom, Busboom Kelly’s sister-in-law.
After the orientation concluded, Freeman parent Jesse Dicks checked out Busboom Kelly’s plaque with the three other area honorees in the Nebraska High School Sports Hall of Fame on the wall behind the bleachers.
Dicks and his family moved to Adams a few years ago. They appreciate the community spirit.
“They (the community) do a lot of fun, family things,” Dicks said.
Dicks, a supervisor in the roofing business in Lincoln, didn’t miss last February’s event, either.
Busboom Kelly was asked about the crowd from her hometown during a press conference after the event. She joked that the students may have had added motivation to attend — they got an excused absence from school.
“But just to see the support out there and hearing them cheer, and to know that they’ll always support one of their own was a very, very neat moment.”
A little more than six months after the event, Busboom Kelly said she is still having a blast. She’s figuring out what makes this talented team click as it heads into its Aug. 22 season opener against No. 3 Pitt. She has dreams and aspirations — just like she did growing up in Gage County.
“Being in a small town,” she said, “doesn’t handcuff you to small things.”
