Depaul Blue Demons Womens Volleyball

A programme built in a 1,500-seat gym

DePaul has fielded a women's volleyball team since 1977, and for most of that run it was a losing proposition: an all-time record of 697-893-12 entering the 2026 season, and a single high-water mark in 2001, the last year the Blue Demons appeared in the NCAA tournament. The home court is McGrath-Phillips Arena, a 1,500-seat hall inside the Sullivan Athletic Center on the Lincoln Park campus, a few blocks from the Fullerton El stop and a world away from the 10,000-seat buildings the sport's richest programmes fill.

Marie Zidek took the job in December 2017. She inherited a side with no conference-tournament appearances to its name — the Big East sends only four teams — and no postseason wins of any kind. Nine seasons in, her record at DePaul stood at 111-118 as of the programme's 10 September game notes, and the gap between what the job was and what it is now accounts for most of the difference.

The receipts Zidek has banked

The rebuild shows up as a sequence of firsts rather than a trophy. DePaul reached the Big East Tournament in 2021, 2023 and 2024 — the first three appearances in programme history — and made the semi-finals each time. In 2023 the Blue Demons won a conference-tournament match for the first time, beating Xavier in the quarter-finals, and took their first postseason win of any description by beating SIU in the National Invitational Volleyball Championship.

2024 went further. DePaul swept St John's in the Big East quarter-finals, the programme's first sweep in conference-tournament play, behind four All-Big East honourees, a programme best. Rachel Krasowski became DePaul's first Big East Libero of the Year. The team passed 20 wins for the first time since 2001, hosted a postseason match at McGrath-Phillips for the first time and reached the NIVC Great 8. The 2025 season was flatter — 14-13 overall, 7-9 in the league, sixth place — but Kendall Timme took Big East Co-Freshman of the Year, another first. DePaul announced a contract extension through 2030 on 2 July 2026. Zidek's work outside Lincoln Park has run alongside it: re-elected to the AVCA board of directors as the Division I women's representative in November 2025, gold with the USA under-23 side at the 2025 NORCECA Pan-American Cup, then gold with the under-17s at the 2026 NORCECA Girls U17 Pan American Cup on a 4-0 run.

The hardest September the programme has scheduled

DePaul opened 2026 by winning everything that was winnable. The Drake Invitational in Des Moines produced three wins across 28-30 August — Milwaukee 3-0, Drake 3-0, South Dakota 3-1 — and Portland State went down 3-1 at McGrath-Phillips on 2 September. Then the schedule turned deliberately brutal. On 4 September the Blue Demons played No. 1 Nebraska at Wintrust Arena, the downtown building DePaul's basketball teams use, in the first meeting between the programmes in more than four decades and the first volleyball match staged there. The crowd was 8,786, an all-time record for college volleyball in Illinois, and most of it wore red. Nebraska hit.434 to DePaul's.060 and won 25-19, 25-13, 25-15.

Three days later No. 12 Penn State sold out McGrath-Phillips and won in three, but only just: 25-23, 27-25, 25-21. Zidek's reading afterwards was that the scoreline did not describe the volleyball. The rest of the month was more profitable. The DePaul Invitational brought sweeps of Central Michigan and Western Michigan on 11 and 12 September before Auburn won 3-1 on Alumni Day, and the Chicago Cup went DePaul's way across both nights — Loyola in five on 18 September, UIC in three on 19 September.

Three-nil in the Big East, and what it cost

Conference play began on the road with a sweep at Providence on 25 September and a 3-1 win at Connecticut the following afternoon. Then, on 30 September at McGrath-Phillips, DePaul went 2-1 down to Marquette and won anyway — 25-20, 13-25, 17-25, 25-23, 15-12 — for its first win in the series since 1 November 2008. That put the Blue Demons 3-0 in the Big East for the first time in programme history and 11-3 overall, their best start to a season in eleven years. Zidek's response acknowledged the scale of what Marquette has been: a programme that had held DePaul's number for well over a decade and still sits at the top of the league.

The run ended on 2 October at D.J. Sokol Arena in Omaha, where Creighton won 25-22, 25-22, 20-25, 25-17. Creighton arrived with 29 consecutive wins over DePaul, a 29-1 series lead, 49 straight regular-season Big East victories and twelve consecutive regular-season league titles, and the pattern of the match was DePaul leading or level and losing the closing exchanges. DePaul out-dug Creighton 48-39 but hit.096 against.215 and lost the block count 14-5. Zidek put part of it down to fatigue after the Marquette five-setter and a long match at UConn in the same short week, and noted the side's.300 attack percentage in the third set as the reason the match went four rather than three. DePaul entered the week of 5 October at 11-4 and 3-1, one of six teams tied for the conference lead.

Who does the work

The offence runs through Leonor Polezzi, a senior setter from Cortona in Italy who came to Chicago after two seasons at North Carolina A&T. She put up a season-high 49 assists with 16 digs and three aces against Marquette, then 34 assists and 11 digs at Creighton, and was named Big East Setter of the Week on 5 October — her fourth weekly award of the season. Her serve is the more unusual weapon: first in the Big East at 0.88 aces per set, eighth nationally with 34 aces, and six consecutive matches with three or more, the longest active streak in Division I.

Timme, now a sophomore, is the primary scorer, with 169 kills through the start of October, third in the league in both kills per set (3.76) and points per set (4.31), and 17 kills at Creighton. Isabela Tavares Salomon, a sophomore right side from Belo Horizonte, matched her career high with 20 kills on.405 hitting against Marquette and took 32 kills at.328 across that weekend. Jade Dudley-Epps supplies blocking and efficiency — 13 kills at.417 against Marquette — while Nora Mannion and Abby Cahill hold the back court; Cahill had 15 digs in Omaha. The roster is unusually international for a mid-sized Chicago programme: six players from Illinois, three from Italy, one from Brazil. The Big East preseason coaches' poll placed DePaul fifth on 62 points.

What the rest of the autumn asks

Eleven matches remain, and the arithmetic is unforgiving: four teams reach the Big East Tournament. Villanova and Georgetown come to McGrath-Phillips on 9 and 10 October, followed by road trips to Seton Hall on 16 October and St John's on 18 October. Xavier and Butler visit on 24 and 25 October before Creighton arrive in Lincoln Park on 30 October for the rematch, with a trip to Marquette on 1 November. Georgetown and Villanova away close out the first week of November, and the regular season ends at home against St John's on 13 November and Seton Hall on 14 November, Senior Day — Polezzi and Mannion's last match in the building.