Beason hits the ground running in her fresh start with Nebraska

One of the six new faces in Nebraska’s roster for the Big Ten women’s volleyball season, opposite Merritt Beason came in with considerably more experience than the five freshmen the Cornhuskers recruited, joining as a transfer after two seasons with Florida.

Still settling with her new team, but at the same time already feeling extremely comfortable in Nebraska, she will be one of the Cornhuskers' main weapons when they face Long Beach State at home on Saturday, at 19:00 local time (00:00 UTC, Sunday) – the match will be streamed live on VBTV for subscribers around the world.

• Watch the Big Ten Volleyball matches live on VBTV.

Beason had two solid seasons with Florida, ranking in the team’s top three in points and kills in both of them before transferring to Nebraska ahead of her junior year. When she got to Lincoln, she knew she was set to start from the bottom again and that she would need to bring a strong mindset in order to fit in the culture of a program that won two national titles in the last decade.

“Coming into a new program, I had to start things over,” she said. “I had to build new relationships with my coaches and my teammates and things like that. That was huge for me at first and that’s a big change. We’re a very young team, but one of our strengths will be our competitiveness. There’s a lot of depth in each position and we compete daily for the spots on the court.”

Beason’s first matches in a Nebraska uniform have been promising as she produced 58 kills, 36 digs, 20 blocks and four aces for the Cornhuskers ahead of Saturday’s match against Long Beach State.

In just a few months with Nebraska, she was also able to take part in a historic moment for not only the program, but for women’s sports in general, playing in front of 92,003 fans at Memorial Stadium in a match against Omaha that set a new world attendance record for women’s sports events.

The opposite, however, has started to make an impact with the team even before she got to play for Nebraska as she was selected as one of the team captains alongside junior libero Lexi Rodriguez by head coach John Cook right after her arrival.

“Our entire team as a whole is a really fun group of girls to lead,” she commented. “We all bring tons of experiences, tons of knowledge and things of that sort. It could have been anyone picked as captains from the freshmen to the juniors and I don't think any of us would have been surprised because our entire team is full of natural leaders. It makes it even more special for us to be the leaders, but also it makes it more fun for our entire team to be able to help and provide input and things of that sort. But it's definitely an honor, and being able to be there for them is going to be really cool this spring and fall.”

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