Drew Hudson takes off for a spike. (Photo by Bo Gabbard)
By Cole Scott
As the clock wound down in the fourth quarter, the boys in black and grey, the South Warren High School basketball team, stood moments from their 14th district tournament run ending on their home court.
The Warren Central High School Dragons from across town were blowing out the flame of victory for the South Warren Spartans and bringing a memorable season for one Spartan senior to a close.
Drew Hudson led his team’s scoring efforts in his final season, including 78 made three-point attempts, making him the school’s all-time leader in that category. His legacy would be left on the school, but not for basketball — not even for a school-associated program.
Drew Hudson’s talents on the court were best fit using a ball that is hit back and forth in the air and over a net, not a ball thrown through the air and into a cylinder.
Drew Hudson, 6-foot-2, started playing volleyball as a kid and won a club volleyball national championship at age 16 and earning all-American honors twice.
He jokingly is called “the greatest boys volleyball player to ever come out of the area,” without playing a single match for South Warren.
The Kentucky High School Athletic Association during its August 2024 board meeting decided to officially sanction boys’ volleyball beginning in spring 2025 — the year after Hudson’s graduation.
Drew Hudson’s reaction to that news reflected disappointment and irony.
“What are the odds that after I leave is when they’re going to get to have a team now?” he said.
Playing after high school was inevitable with his volleyball talent, but his journey to the collegiate ranks began as a child playing for a college coach that would ultimately become a nationally known member of the volleyball community, his father Travis Hudson.
Travis Hudson grew up in western Kentucky. He graduated from Edmonson County High School and earned a bachelor’s degree in Bowling Green at Western Kentucky University in 1994. Just a year later, he became the head coach of the Lady Hilltopper volleyball team.
For him, the game wasn’t available growing up. His high school did not have a boy’s or girl’s program, so instead he gravitated toward basketball and football.
It wasn’t until his time as a student at WKU that he discovered volleyball.
“When I got here, I just happened upon some guys playing the sport and really fell in love with it,” he said. “It’s a sport that you can play for a lifetime, and it’s certainly given me and my family a lot.”
Looking back on his ongoing 30-year career, Travis Hudson’s success foreshadowed that of his son.
The WKU Lady Toppers have won 13 conference championships in that span, 11 all-American athletes have developed under Hudson, and he has also been named conference coach of the year nine times.
“There’s national recognition, annually, that comes with {the success of the program} that you really can’t put a price tag on,” said Todd Stewart, WKU Director of Athletics.
As Travis Hudson put WKU volleyball among the top schools in the nation, Drew Hudson watched behind the scenes and aspired spiring to play volleyball.
“I loved climbing up on the couch and watching film with him and all that kind of stuff,” Drew Hudson said. “I was provided with some pretty cool opportunities as I was coming up through him.”
His father saw the potential and love for volleyball.
“Drew, from the time he was little, was really infatuated with the sport,” Travis Hudson said. “As he started getting older, he was at practice every day, and he really started to gain some skill messing around with me and being in our gym.”
Despite the lack of a high school team, Drew Hudson forged ahead.
His first organized team play came as a teenager when he played club volleyball with the closest program available in Nashville, Tennessee. This furthered his development for four years, while he played basketball at South Warren.
Despite his success in basketball, it was volleyball that would provide Hudson an opportunity to play collegiate sports after high school. He landed at Ohio State University, one of the few colleges in the nation that has a men’s volleyball program — a winning one, with three NCAA titles since 2011.
“It’s really beating all the odds to grow up in an area with no high school foundation to play and still achieve at the level that he has,” Travis Hudson said.
Lee Feinswog is the owner and a writer for Volleyballmag.com, which covers both the men’s and women’s games on a national level. He saw the highest level of play this past summer.
“Every seat at every match for the Olympics in Paris was sold out,” Feinswog said.
The United States has seen some success in the Olympics with the men’s team winning gold three times (1984, 1988, 2008) and the women’s team winning gold for the first time in 2020. But it’s not been until as of late that the game has begun to boom in the United States.
In 2023, the girl’s collegiate game saw record-shattering attendance for a regular season matchup between the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Cornhuskers and the University of Nebraska- Omaha Mavericks. In Lincoln, 92,003 fans couldn’t pile into the school’s gymnasium, so they played on Nebraska’s football field in Memorial Stadium.
Not only did the match set viewership records for the sport, but it also set the world record for the most-watched women’s sporting event.
Feinswog believes this is a perfect example of how far the sport has come and why.
“It’s well played — it’s beautiful athletes in a graceful sport,” he said.
He believes the men’s game, at least collegiately, should see more growth within the lopsided numbers of current teams: 1,058 women’s teams in the NCAA (Divisions I, II, and III) and just 191 men’s teams in the NCAA (Divisions I and III).
“You’ve already got the gym, the net and the volleyballs (for the women’s teams),” Feinswog said. “So, what do you need? You need players, some scholarship money, depending on how much you’re going to fund it, and coaches, and then the operational aspects of a team.”
Amid all the nationwide growth, Kentucky is seeing the game emerge by creating an official program for boys after 43 schools in the state showed interest in fielding a team, as opposed to the girl’s game that has 279 current teams.
Drew Hudson won’t partake in the inaugural campaign, but another father-son duo is preparing to hit the court this spring in Frankfort, Kentucky, an area where the game has more popularity and offers more competition.
Mark Wallace played beach volleyball with friends while at Western Hills High School in Frankfort, Kentucky from 1992-1996. After joining some local leagues and serving as a referee for a handful of years, Wallace decided to go into coaching.
In 2012, Western Hills came to Mark Wallace looking for a junior varsity coach, and just a year later, he was asked to begin a middle school program at Bondurant Middle School, also in Frankfort.
Mark Wallace enjoyed coaching girls, but around 2019, rumors about boy’s programs started picking up momentum. Wallace had two sons nearing high school age at the time, so he started a boy’s program at Western Hills.
The inspiration for his son, Carson Wallace, mirrors that of Drew Hudson in the way the two saw passion for the sport stem from observing their father’s take on the game.
“I would go into the gym and just hit the ball around in elementary school,” Carson Wallace said.
He saw the opportunities arise to play the game, and it was a no-brainer to get involved.
“I had been around it for so long,” he said. “I was like, ‘Obviously I have to try it.’”
Carson Wallace has played a few years of club volleyball and is ready to “officially” play in his senior season.
Carson Wallace in action (Photo by Bo Gabbard)
“I mean I wish it would’ve happened sooner, but I’m very excited to have an officially regulated system,” he said.“Now that we’re able to have a fully sanctioned sport, it will feel more real.”
Both Wallaces believe that the boys’ side has been discounted with a “club” title, but with the state now sanctioning it, they believe traction will build, and the boys’ game will gain some respect.
“I think the KHSAA sanctioning gives us more standing, at least within our school,” Mark Wallace said. “We’ve had to pull from other sports just to put a team together, but now that we’re official, I’m hoping that it helps us draw in more participation.”
Mark Wallace said that the growth has been exponential for the sport regarding his program and the leagues they’ve played in up until this initial regulated season, and he hopes that will translate to what they see come spring.
“We went from five teams in the first year we played, to 13 the second year, and last year we pushed all the way to 45, which is what I believe we had to have to become sanctioned,” Mark Wallace said.
Now that both boys and girls can hit the court in a gym to competitively play volleyball, the question is: What about the game draws in fans on either side?
Is one more entertaining than the other to watch/play or are both for the most part the same? Well, Mark Wallace and Travis Hudson see key characteristics in each.
“It’s just a different game from one to the other,” Mark Wallace said. “The boys have a lot more power involved. The girls have power too, but on a different level, but they’re both equally as fun.”
Travis Hudson focused on the unique position women’s volleyball holds.
“This is one of the rare sports where the women’s game is held in higher esteem than the men’s game,” Travis Hudson said. “Coaching boys is just a very different game than on the female side, not only in some of the way it’s played, but also just in the way that players respond. It’s a different game for sure.”
He said that the women’s game brings in more financial sponsors than the men’s.
Travis Hudson admires the growth of the game on both sides, but a boys’ team coming to WKU involves a lot more than momentum. That shows why there may never be an official men’s team for the Hilltoppers and many other colleges.
Federal legislation called Title IX covers a wide variety of issues, and it branches into the sports world when it comes to gender equity in athletic programs. The U.S Department of Education explains that “if a school operates or sponsors an athletic program, it must provide equal athletic opportunities regardless of sex.”
Mark Wallace (Photo by Bo Gabbard)
“I think what slows the growth in boys’ volleyball is the Title IX impact because rosters are so big for football, there’s nothing like it on the women’s side, so it takes a lot of female sports just to balance out that one,” Travis Hudson said.
Money also factors in.
“Obviously, if we add a program, that’s adding an expense,” Stewart said. “You have the scholarship cost. Then you have to pay your coaches. Then you have the operational cost, and the travel, and the insurance, and everything that goes into a sport program.”
Despite boys’ volleyball getting sanctioned at the high school level in Kentucky, it’s clear that WKU will not have a team anytime soon. Some might imagine a scenario in which Travis Hudson also coached a men’s team at WKU.
But he doesn’t take stock in that plot.
“I don’t need more to do,” Travis said. “Maybe that’s a question for Drew. Maybe that’s his natural path — by the time he’s done playing at Ohio State if he wants to get into coaching.”
Resources:
https://wkusports.com/sports/womens-volleyball/roster/coaches/travis-hudson/675
https://www.ncaa.com/history/volleyball-men/nc
https://ohiostatebuckeyes.com/documents/2023/12/26/Team_Guide_2024_122623_1.pdf
https://www.nbcolympics.com/news/volleyball-101-olympic-history-records-and-results
Title IX Frequently Asked Questions – NCAA.org
Drew Hudson – 2025 – Men’s Volleyball – Ohio State
D1.pdf – 346 D1 Women’s teams
D2.pdf – 296 D2 Women’s teams
D3.pdf – 416 D3 Women’s teams
NC.pdf – 60 D1 Men’s teams all-time
D3.pdf – 131 D3 Men’s teams all-time