Nebraska volleyball star Harper Murray focuses on healing - ESPN

Editor's note: This story was originally published on Aug. 27, 2024.

HARPER MURRAY DIDN'T want people to see her cry, so she escaped to the bathroom. She stood in front of a mirror and un-puffed her eyes. She wanted to kick a wall. Her No. 1 Nebraska volleyball team had just lost the national championship to Texas in straight sets, and now she was being summoned to a postgame news conference to deconstruct the whole debacle.

Two Nebraska staffers walked in and tried to coax her to the dais.

«If I go in there,» she told them, «it's not going to go well.»

Murray always considered herself a social person, but not on a night when she played, in her opinion, one of the worst matches of her life. She had nothing to say.

They assured her that her teammates would be there and that she didn't have to answer any questions she didn't want to, so she trudged to the front. And she was doing fine. Murray sat there blank-faced and mostly silent for 8½ minutes, fidgeting with her ear piercings, and then someone asked her about next year and she could contain herself no more.

«I think we're going to win three national championships the next three years,» she said.

Murray's teammate Rebekah Allick, seated two chairs over, loved it. «F--- yeah,» she said on a hot mic. Murray's mom, Sarah, heard about it on the walk from the arena to her hotel and was equally pumped: «There's my girl!»

But it did not go over as well on social media. The next morning on the team's flight back to Lincoln, Murray scrolled through her phone and read the trolls. They told her she should learn how to pass before she talked smack. Some of them said her late father would be disappointed in her. Others told her to kill herself.

«A lot of those comments on social