College volleyball opens in Milwaukee next week. Maggie Li came from Beijing.

College volleyball’s season starts Aug. 21 in an NBA building. The AVCA First Serve runs four nights at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, eight matches, ESPN and Fox on the call. Texas A&M, the defending national champion, opens against Louisville at 6 p.m. Eastern on ESPN2. Later that night, Kentucky plays Wisconsin on ESPN. Classes will barely be settled. The gym will be full anyway.

Women’s volleyball already sells out midweeks in Lincoln and Madison. Last year’s Nebraska–Kentucky regular-season match was the most-watched of its kind on record. First Serve used to live in those towns. This year it moved to the Bucks’ arena, and Nebraska is sitting it out for the first time since the event took this shape. The names on the sheet are still the ones American club volleyball built: Kyndal Stowers, who was outstanding player of A&M’s title run, Brooklyn DeLeye, Kentucky’s senior hitter, plus Texas, Pitt, and Wisconsin. Marquette closes the week against Texas on Monday.

Those rosters were built on U.S. clubs and the transfer portal. The East Asian names in this sport are on other campuses. One of them sat Big Ten media day last week.

Maggie Li is a 6-foot-3 senior outside hitter at UCLA, from Beijing. Her mother, Chunyuan Sheng, played for China’s junior national team. Li swam and thought about tennis, then stayed with the family sport. In 2022 she took silver with China at the Asian U-20 Championship. A year later, as a freshman at Cal, she put up 441 kills and became Pac-12 Freshman of the Year — the first Bear to win it since 1990. She led Cal in kills in 28 matches as a sophomore, then transferred to Westwood.

She picked UCLA because of Alfee Reft. He left in January for the new LOVB San Francisco franchise. Li stayed. Last season she had 20 kills against No. 1 Nebraska and 12 in an NCAA Tournament win over Georgia Tech. On Aug. 3 she represented the Bruins at Big Ten media day with first-year coach Matt Werle. UCLA opens Aug. 28 at Long Beach State.

“The Chinese women’s national team is known for its grittiness,” she told the Daily Bruin in January. “I think that really brought me to who I am today.” The other part of the jump was language. Volleyball is a talking sport. She said she could not speak the terms at first.

Japan’s path into this league is quieter, and it usually runs through junior college. Rana Yamada, a libero from Yokohama, won regional libero awards at Central Wyoming and Arizona Western, then took 389 digs as Syracuse’s starter last fall — the most by an Orange player since 2017. She is at South Florida now.

Syracuse still has the next two. Yuka Urano, a Tokyo libero who was Region XIV Libero of the Year at Navarro College, is a sophomore. Aileen Kotone McAllister, an outside hitter from Yokosuka, played for Japan’s U-17 team and scored 16 points against Croatia at the 2024 U-17 World Championship. She is a true freshman.

Japan already has a school-to-club ladder that feeds the SV.League, so most of its best players never need an American campus. China has a national-team system that almost never lets a U-20 outside hitter walk into Berkeley. Li came anyway. Yamada and Urano needed two junior-college stops before they reached the ACC. McAllister is the rare Japan youth-national name arriving as a freshman. Most of the international depth in this sport still comes from Europe and Brazil.

Opening night in Milwaukee is the right place to start. Stowers and DeLeye will be on national television, and the building should look like the Kohl Center on a September Tuesday: packed, loud, a one-point set. Li plays at Pauley against Long Beach State on Aug. 29. McAllister gets in when Syracuse puts her on the sheet.