Husker Signee Drewnick Reclassifies to 2019 Class

Nebraska volleyball head coach John Cook has announced that setter Nicole Drewnick will join the Huskers for the upcoming 2019 season.

Drewnick, a versatile 6-2 athlete from Carrollton, Texas, was originally committed to the Huskers for 2020 but reclassified to join the Huskers this season instead. She plans to enroll at UNL in June and be on the Huskers’ China trip, which begins June 15.

“We recruited Nicole because she’s a great volleyball player, not just a great setter,” Cook said. “Like a lot of great setters we have had, she can do everything. She can block, hit, serve and pass. She fits the mold of the type of setter we like to recruit to Nebraska.”

Drewnick won two state championships with Hebron High School in Texas 6A as a freshman and sophomore, but she spent most of her junior year playing for the Brazilian youth national team. Drewnick’s mother, Cilene, played for Brazil in the Olympics, and she and her husband, Eduardo, run the Texas Instinct club program. While Drewnick was representing Brazil, she took online high school classes and started considering reclassifying to the 2019 class.

“We started talking about it over a year ago, especially with the upcoming Asia trip and the opportunity to be a part of that,” Cook said. “We kept having conversations last summer, over Christmas break, and monitoring whether it would be possible. She’s been working really hard to graduate, and she’s going to be a player who can contribute in a lot of different ways.”

Drewnick will join sophomore Nicklin Hames as setters on NU’s roster. Mari Kurkova, who was slated to be the Huskers’ only senior on the roster in 2019, has left the team and is planning to finish her Master’s degree this summer at UNL. Kurkova has been accepted into a graduate program that begins in October in her home country of the Czech Republic.

The Huskers will begin practice late next week in preparation for their trip to China.