South Florida Bulls volleyball
women's volleyball team of the University of South Florida
The South Florida Bulls volleyball team represents the University of South Florida in the sport of women's volleyball. The Bulls compete in the American Conference of NCAA Division I. The team plays their home games at The Corral inside the Yuengling Center on USF's campus in Tampa, Florida. They are coached by Jolene Shepardson who was hired after the 2019 season. The Bulls have reached seven NCAA women's volleyball tournaments and won a combined 19 regular season and tournament conference championships in their history, the most of any women's team at USF.
History
Like many women's sports teams in colleges across the country, the USF women's volleyball team was founded in 1972 after the passing of Title IX. The NCAA did not sponsor women's sports at the time, so the Lady Brahmans as they were known until 1987 played in the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) Small College Division (equivalent to NCAA Division II) for their first year and the AIAW Large College Division (equivalent to NCAA Division I) from 1973 until the association dissolved after the spring of 1982.
The Brahmans played as independents as members of the AIAW, as well as during their first year in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). They joined USF's men's teams in the Sun Belt Conference before their 1983 season, and they won their first conference championship that year.
The program was very successful in the years directly after they joined the NCAA. In the first 21 seasons after the AIAW's collapse, USF won all of their 11 regular season conference titles and seven conference tournaments, as well as making each of their seven NCAA women's volleyball tournament appearances. They have also made the National Invitational Volleyball Championship (formerly called the Women's Invitational Volleyball Championship) four times, including a quarterfinal appearance in 1994 and semifinal appearance in 2023.
In 1995 the team moved from the old USF Gymnasium, where it had called home since the team was founded in 1972, to The Corral, a volleyball-specific area within the Yuengling Center with a capacity of about 1,000. The Bulls also play some home games on the main floor of the Yuengling Center (used for the men's and women's basketball teams), particularly rivalry games and games against ranked opponents.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “South Florida Bulls volleyball” is women's volleyball team of the University of South Florida. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through South, Florida and Bulls, not as a finished interpretation.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q104881858. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2019, 1972, 1987 and 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “South Florida Bulls volleyball” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.