'I'm willing to leave all of it'

The Kansas volleyball team is coming home.

After playing 14 road matches in 30 days to open the 2025 season, first-year KU coach Matt Ulmer will finally get to unveil his brand of volleyball in front of the home crowd on Friday night, when Arizona State comes to Horejsi Family Volleyball Arena for a 7 p.m. match.

While team retreats, roadtrips and trial by fire has brought the 18th-ranked Jayhawks together, the first home match of the season will be a new experience for several Jayhawks who were not around in the past.

And no one faced a wilder path to KU than setter Cristin Cline, a redshirt-sophomore who followed Ulmer from Oregon to Kansas.

In the span of less than two weeks last January, the all-Big Ten setter in 2024 went from starting a new quarter at Oregon to watching her entire life get thrown into an upheaval, not smoothing out until she landed in Kansas.

Dorothy and the tornado have nothing on this story.

The way Cline saw it, January 17th was just another day. Oregon had just started school after a break between quarters and the North Carolina native was happy to be back on campus and back with her teammates to gear up for some offseason volleyball work after their run to the Elite Eight in December.

And then the news came. Ulmer, who was not looking to leave Eugene, met with his team to tell them he had accepted the head coaching job at Kansas.

It was a short meeting filled with tears and it took place an hour or so before Cline and several of her teammates were supposed to make an appearance at an elementary school pep rally.

“I am so un-pep right now,” she remembered thinking.

From there, her head really started to spin.

Later that day, during an individual meeting with Ulmer, where more tears flowed on both sides of the desk, Cline was in a bit of a daze and just kept thinking, “Where does this leave me? What am I going I do?”

“I think initially I was just very scared,” she told R1S1 Sports in a recent sit-down interview about her journey to becoming a Jayhawk. “I had no intention of transferring. It was my first season. I did well. I knocked down a bunch of boundaries and walls that I was trying to get through. I had a breakthrough year and I was just like, ‘What are we doing? Umm, hello?’”

Ulmer tried to explain but knew it would be tricky. There were reasons for the move that only he understood, factors and justifications that a college sophomore probably couldn’t grasp.

After some brief therapy, he told Cline that she would be an absolutely dynamite commodity in the transfer portal if she decided to enter it.

“He’s crying at this point. I’m hysterical. It was wild,” Cline said. “We talked for a bit and he told me, whether you come to Kansas or not is your decision, but if you do decide to leave Oregon, call me when you’re in the portal.”

From there, Cline made phone calls to her mom, dad, sister and volleyball mentors.

She then went to eat lunch with her boyfriend at the time, pulling him away from his baseball teammates for an important chat. Shortly thereafter, she met up with her volleyball teammates, who were feeling many of the same emotions and facing many of the same fears as Cline.

After breaking down in tears in front of her then-boyfriend, she uttered a simple sentence: “I think I’m deciding to transfer.”

Afterwards, when she talked with her teammates, who all were curious about what the others were thinking and planning, she uttered similar words: “I think I’m gonna transfer.”

Through it all, one question kept bouncing around in Cline’s head. And as soon as she accepted the answer, her decision about the next step became much easier.

The question? “What’s tying you to Oregon?”

“Honestly, nothing,” she said at the time. “I literally told Matt, I’m willing to leave all of it.”

And then she made that stance official, asking the Oregon compliance office to put her name in the portal.

There was a logjam of names to put in the portal that day. Oregon’s beach volleyball coach also was leaving. So, the process took a little longer than it normally would’ve. But by 2 p.m. of the same day she heard the news from Ulmer, Cline was officially ready to move on.

After texting Ulmer to tell him she was in the portal, the two met in his office and his words added an extra layer of anxiety to the situation.

“We would really love to have you at Kansas, obviously,” Cline recalled Ulmer telling her. “This is your decision about whether you want to come to Kansas and what you would like to do, but just know you’re on a timeline, I fear.”

That wasn’t a tactic. That was a fact.

Things move quickly in the transfer portal — in all sports — and Ulmer and his coaching staff were already scrambling to fill the openings on the KU roster, watching the precious few players who were available at that time make their decisions quickly. That’s while starting from behind every other Power 4 volleyball program in the first place because of the coaching change.

Luckily for the Jayhawks, they filled one of the openings quickly.

Taking her parents’ advice, Cline made sure to ask if she would get the same type of scholarship at KU as the one she had at Oregon. It was. And that was that all she needed to hear.

“I was like, ‘I’ll take it,’” Cline recalled. “‘I’m coming with you, Matt. Let’s go.’ I went in the portal on Do Not Disturb. Don’t call me. No one call me. I don’t want to see anyone else. And no one did.”

Cline heard from one of Ulmer’s assistants that some other coaches and programs asked around about her availability. But she never heard from them directly.

From that point on, it was Rock Chalk Jayhawk.

Cline did manage to squeeze in an official visit. Again, at the urging of her parents. But she had made the decision to join Ulmer in Lawrence long before she arrived in the Sunflower State.

Getting there was its own wild adventure.

With their daughter scrambling to move halfway across the country, Cline’s parents flew from Charlotte to Oregon to help her pack up.

Her dad rented a Chevy Suburban, and Cline piled as much as she could into the rental car and her 2-door Honda Accord.

“It all fit perfectly,” she said, hinting that there was a bit of serendipity at play there.

After giving away more than half of the Oregon gear she had collected during her two years in Eugene, Cline and her parents hopped in the car to make the 24-hour drive to Kansas, her dad in the Suburban and her and her mother in the Honda.

“We started driving Tuesday and we drove two days, through snow, sleet, Colorado. You name it, we went through it,” she said.

They broke the drive into two 12-hour segments and arrived in Lawrence that Thursday.

It was weird. It was cold. And it was the beginning of an acclimation process that remained ongoing into the summer.

But there was still something right about it. Cline was convinced from the beginning that she did the right thing, a fact that was solidified a couple of months later.

“My first moment of, ‘Wow, I really did this,’ was when I went all the way back to Oregon to see my friends for spring break,” she said. “None of my teammates were there, everyone had left, my boyfriend at the time was there, but I was like, ‘This just isn’t my life anymore.’”

As the spring semester and summer workouts went on in Lawrence, it became more and more important for Cline to find her footing.

As one KU assistant told her, she had to stop searching for what she had at Oregon and find a way to embrace what she has in Lawrence.

It took time, but she made progress each day.

Rooming with fellow-transfers Ryan White (Oregon State), Audra Wilmes (Washington) and Indianapolis freshman Logan Bell helped a great deal because they were all new. But she still tried hard to avoid being seen as a teacher’s pet.

Because Cline was the only one on the roster who had played for Ulmer before, the returning Jayhawks and incoming transfers all naturally looked to her for input, simply because of her familiarity with the coaching staff.

On drills, on schedules, on style, philosophy and more, Cline had the answers that people wanted. And she shared them. But she did so organically, allowing the team to grow and come together naturally.

It reminded her a little of how things went back in high school, when she shifted from outside hitter, a position she played until she was 16 years old, to setter quite literally overnight.

That story goes like this. On June 14, 2021, she and her club teammates went to a tournament. On June 15, the team’s setter went down with an injury.

So, Cline filled in at setter. And she did well. That date — June 15, 2021 — also happened to be the first day that college coaches could contact high school juniors under the new recruiting rules, and guess who happened to be in the gym that day, watching Cline set for what might as well have been the first time.

Ulmer, of course.

“That was literally the first time Matt saw me, at the first tournament where I was a setter,” Cline marveled. “And he saw something in me that no one else saw.”

Up to that point, she was planning to continue her volleyball career as an outside hitter at Division II Nova Southeastern University in Davie, Florida, between Miami and Fort Lauderdale.

“I was gonna be a marine biologist,” she said, laughing. “I had my life all planned out.”

And then it all changed. Twice.

Not too much, though. And certainly not for the worse.

Kansas is home now. The Jayhawks are 9-5 and ready to jump into Big 12 play — Cline’s third different conference in three seasons of college volleyball — and, so far, Cline has teamed with returning Jayhawk Katie Dalton to run Ulmer’s offense and lead the Jayhawks to some solid volleyball against a murder’s row type of schedule.

Even though her life is significantly more settled today than it was eight months ago, and even though the KU colors and her new teammates and dorm room and favorite restaurants are all normal now, Cline still finds herself thinking, “Wow. This is real. That was not a dream.”

— For tickets to all KU athletic events, visit kuathletics.com