Penn State started the 2024 NCAA women’s volleyball season with a lot of winning — eight straight, to be exact. What was happening on the court was overshadowed by the news the Nittany Lions heard off it: their head coach, Katie Schumacher-Cawley, was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer.

She was clear that her diagnosis didn’t change anything for the team. She’d be at every practice while undergoing treatment, and the team still should be focused on winning.

On Sunday, Penn State kept that focus as it won the NCAA Division I women’s volleyball title with a 3-1 victory over Louisville at the Yum Center in Louisville. It was Penn State's eighth national championship, its first with Schumacher-Cawley at the helm. She secured another first with the win, too, becoming the first woman to coach a women’s volleyball team to the Division I NCAA title in the first championship game to feature two female coaches.

“The biggest thing I’m taking away from the season is you can do anything. You can do anything you set your mind to," Penn State's Jess Mruzik said after the game. "With [Schumacher-Cawley] doing everything she’s doing, that helped us as a group also believe that we were capable of this. Because everyone says that they believe they can do this. But there aren’t very many people that truly, deeply know that they can do this. And she’s just been an inspiration to us, and she’s helped us believe that we can accomplish what we just accomplished.”

Mruzik’s play is a big reason why Penn State won the championship game. She had 29 kills, 16 digs and five blocks. More importantly, she helped keep her team calm and locked in when the Nittany Lions struggled, including during a marathon second set. Mruzik was named the 2024 Most Outstanding Player of the tournament.

Louisville wins marathon 2nd set

Penn State won the first set and had an 18-12 lead in the second set. Slowly, Louisville started to work its way back into the set. An ace from Payton Petersen lit a fire under her Cardinals teammates. Still, Penn State got to set point with a lead of 24-20. This kicked off an improbable and thrilling run where Louisville held off 10 set points from Penn State. The Nittany Lions had run out of substitutions and had players playing out of their normal positions. This opened the door for Louisville to win the set 34-32. Charitie Luper’s three kills in the final five points helped seal the set for the Cardinals.

The record crowd of 21,860 fans was electric throughout the match, but hit new levels of loud in the second set. Louisville head coach Dani Busboom-Kelly thought winning that second set might have put momentum on her team’s side.

“I thought when we went into the locker room, it was like, we have hope now that we can do this," Busboom-Kelly said. "I thought we fought the whole game. We needed Charitie and Sofia [Diaz Maldonado] to have huge nights, and they did. Again, we couldn’t slow them down either. So we did a lot of things that we felt like we needed to do to win. They matched it, and were better in some of those areas."

For Louisville, it was the team's second loss in the title game in three years. Anna DeBeer, an All-American who was at the heart of the team’s success, had to miss the game with an ankle injury she sustained during Thursday’s semifinal win over Pittsburgh. Freshman Petersen stepped up in her spot, and had four kills and set digs.

Katie Schumacher-Cawley’s journey

Schumacher-Cawley won a title at Penn State as a player in 1999. She was elevated to the head coaching position at her alma mater in 2022 to take the place of her coach, Russ Rose. She helped recruit players like Mruzik, who earned her bachelor’s degree playing at Michigan before switching to Penn State, and Taylor Trammell, who played at Purdue for two seasons before finding her home in State College.

Now, in her third year as head coach, Schumacher-Cawley got to celebrate a national title with her team and make history. She is expected to have surgery in January, and she finds inspiration in the other people she sees battling cancer.

“People talk about inspiration and things like that," Schumacher-Cawley said. "I'll tell you I'm going to UPenn, and every day I walk into the hospital there, and the children's hospital is right across the street. So for me, that's my perspective. There's babies and younger kids that are really sick, and I'm going to be healthy and I will get through this, and it's just part of my journey and my life right now.”