For the fourth-straight season, The Big West will be represented by two teams in the 2025 National Collegiate Beach Volleyball bracket, announced by the committee today. Big West champion and automatic qualifier Long Beach State is joined by at-large entrant Cal Poly in the field of 16.
The National Collegiate Championship gets underway on Friday, May 2, and runs through Sunday, May 4 in the crowning event from Gulf Place.
The championship will be played Gulf Shores, Ala., in a single-elimination bracket with 10 student-athletes split into five pairs from each team. The dual meet match is formatted in five best-of-three flighted pairs matches, with each pairs match being worth one point.
The Beach (27-7) received the No. 9 seed in the top quadrant of the bracket. LBSU will square off in the 8/9 matchup against Florida State on Friday, May 2 at 9 a.m. PT to open up the national postseason. FSU holds the 7-3 edge in the all-time series on the sand.
The Beach took on the Seminoles four weeks ago at the Death Volley Invitational in Baton Rouge, La. LBSU fell 3-1 in that match with the No. 5 pairing of Megan Widener and Demi Wagdy winning the first frame 21-16 and earning the team point after their opponents withdrew.
A familiar postseason foe for Big West teams, Florida State has been matched against a league team on seven previous occasions in the championship bracket since sport sponsorship, but never with the Beach. Overall, The Big West is 3-4 against FSU in the National Collegiate bracket since 2016.
The match victor will go up against either top-seeded UCLA or No. 16 Chattanooga in Friday’s second round.
Runners-up to LBSU in the league title match, Cal Poly (29-7) enters into the 16-team draw as the No. 6 seed. The Mustangs take on No. 11 LSU at 1 p.m. on Thursday in the nightcap match of Day 1 of competition. The two have tussled just three times, with the last meeting coming on Feb. 23, 2019, a 3-2 affair pulled out by LSU.
The winner between the Tigers and Mustangs will advance to play the winner of No. 3 Stanford and No. 14 Boise State. Should the bracket seeds hold, the Cal Poly/Stanford contest would be a rematch of an April 11 meeting in The Center of Effort Challenge where the duo of Lindsey Sparks and Quinn Perry claimed the team’s lone point from Court 3. Despite the 4-1 score, three duals went the full three sets before the Cardinal closed with the win.
Every match will air live on the ESPN family of networks with ESPN covering the first two days on the sand, and the Championship broadcast on ESPN.