Pitt Volleyball, Penn State Share Storied Rivalry

The Pitt Panthers and Penn State Nittany Lions share a storied volleyball rivalry.

Pitt Volleyball Celebrates after a point / Courtesy of Pitt Athletics

PITTSBURGH -- The Pitt Panthers will face off against the Penn State Nittany Lions on Sept. 18 at the Petersen Events Center, reiginiting a storied volleyball rivalry.

History of Pitt-Penn State Volleyball Rivalry 

The two programs have faced off 55 times, which is the second most Pitt has played a team, with rival Syracuse first at 59 games. Penn State holds the all-time series lead, 34-21.

Most of these meetings came prior to 1991, with only nine matches between the two since then, with three of them coming in the NCAA Tournament.

Russ Rose made Penn State into one of the best programs in the country, spending 43 seasons at the helm from 1979-2021 and winning a Division I record 1,330 games.

He also led the program to seven National Championships, second most behind Stanford with nine, with four straight from 2007-10 and back-to-back in 2013-14. 

Rose dominated the Panthers in the rivalry, with 16 straight wins from 1987-2017 and a 33-14 record in the series during his tenure.

Panthers head coach Dan Fisher arrived at the program in 2013 and started to build it into a respectable outfit in the middle of the 2010s. 

His first two NCAA Tournament appearances in 2016 and 2017, they had to play Penn State in the Second Round on the road, losing both times in four sets.

Pitt and Penn State played a home-and-away over a weekend in September 2019, the last time the two played in the regular season. Pitt stunned Penn State by sweeping them on the road, their first win at Rec Hall since 1980 and just their second sweep there. Penn State got revenge in front of a program record crowd at the time at the Petersen Events Center, winning in five sets just two days later.

The last match in the Keystone Classic came in the Second Round of the NCAA Tournament in 2021 at the Petersen Events Center. The No. 1 Panthers took down the Nittany Lions in four sets, the last match of Rose's tenure.

That victory for Pitt volleyball put them on top of the commonwealth, something most people would never have predicted after Penn State's dominance through the early part of the 2010s.

Pitt has made four straight Elite Eights and three straight Final Fours, the only team in Division I to do the latter.

Katie Schumacher-Cawley, who played on the first Penn State National Championship team in 1999, took over the program in 2022 and has gotten the team to make back-to-back Sweet 16 appearances.

The teams also faced off in the spring at each school, with Pitt winning in four sets at Fitzgerald Field House and Penn State winning in five sets at Rec Hall.

Future of the Rivalry 

The two teams will play at Rec Hall in 2025, as a part of a home-and-away contract the two schools signed, according to Fisher.

"It took a while to get the contract signed, but I think Penn State’s going to be very good this year and I think it’s good for both of us, especially with, both our travels are getting [longer] in conference a lot," Fisher said in the preseason. "So when we have a team that close, that’s that good, that we can get big crowds at both places, I think it’s good for both of us."

The two schools have increased travel as the dissolution of the Pac-12 lead to a number of their teams moving to new conferences. The Big Ten took Washington, Oregon, USC and UCLA, while the ACC took Stanford and Cal, plus SMU, located in Dallas, from the American Athletic Conference.

This adds a number of miles for travel and having top teams just 2:30 hours driving apart is a much better option for non-conference play.

With any sport these two rivals both play in, there is general excitement around any game or match against them. Outside of the nonsense surrounding the football series, other games featuring Pitt and Penn State have great fanfare and moments that make any rivalry great. 

The men's soccer teams opened their seasons in 2023 at Ambrose Urbanic Field, which ended in a 1-1 draw, multiple yellow cards, a player for Pitt sent off and a crowd filled to capacity with students and families alike. Pitt would defeat Penn State this season, coming back to get a 2-1 victory on the road.

If both Fisher and Schumacher-Cawley continue to keep a high standard for Pitt and Penn State, there's no reason the two teams shouldn't play every year.

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