All four Southern California teams came awfully close to advancing to the second round of the NCAA Beach Volleyball Championships.
UCLA and USC swept their way out of the first round and last year’s finalist, Loyola Marymount, narrowly got by, while Long Beach State lost a heartbreaker on Friday in Gulf Shores, Alabama.
The third-seeded Bruins (31-6) eliminated 14th-seeded Tulane, thanks to the teams of Maggie Boyd and Sally Perez (21-16, 21-14), Kaley Mathews and Ensley Alden (21-10, 21-16) and Kenzie Brower and Mallory LaBreche (21-12, 21-13).
The fourth-seeded Trojans (29-11), whose run of four consecutive national titles was upended last year in the semifinals, similarly took care of 13th-seeded Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, with Ashley Pater and Kennedy Coakley (21-12, 21-12), Madison Goellner and Kaileigh Truslow (21-14, 21-9) and Quincy Stephens and Kerry Keefe (21-7, 21-13) doing the honors.
The seventh-seeded Lions (30-10), who fell to TCU, 3-2, in the championship match last year, got even with the 10th-seeded Horned Frogs, ousting the defending champs, 3-2.
Chloe Hooker and Ines Piret won their opener, 21-11, 21-17, to get LMU on the board, but TCU took the next two matches. Facing elimination, Maja Kruczek and Josefine Schaekel stormed back to tie it with a 14-21, 27-25, 15-13 victory. That left Tanon Rosenthal and Anna Pelloia to close it out with a 27-25, 21-17 victory.
Ninth-seeded Long Beach (25-12) had arguably the most entertaining match of the day before falling to eighth-seeded Cal, 3-2.
It came down to the final pairing as LBSU’s Victoria Henkel and Savannah Standage, after splitting the first two sets, rallied for match point at 14-12, but Cal’s Gia Fisher and Ava Haughy fought it off for their own match point. Henkel and Standage staved it off twice before Cal came out on top, 18-16.
Tineke Hinton and Demi Wagdy (19-21, 21-17, 15-10) and Kealoha Phillips and Brooke Birch (21-13, 19-21, 15-9) collected hard-fought wins for Long Beach.
All second-round matches Saturday will air on ESPN2, as will the semifinals later that day at 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. The championship match is Sunday at 9:30 a.m. on ESPN.
NCAA Beach Volleyball Championships Second Round
7 a.m.: No. 1 Stanford vs. No. 8 Cal
8 a.m.: No. 4 USC vs. No. 5 Florida State
9 a.m.: No. 2 Texas vs. No. 7 Loyola Marymount
10 a.m.: No. 3 UCLA vs. No. 6 Cal Poly