Maggie Boyd looks up as UCLA teammate Lexy Denaburg tries to knuckle over USC’s Megan Kraft/Tim Britt, techandphoto.com Once again it came down to USC vs. UCLA. Top-seeded USC came through the contenders bracket Friday to beat third-seeded Stanford and then second-seeded UCLA to win the final Pac-12 Championship. Hawai’i beat Long Beach State to win the Big West.  Loyola Marymount beat Pepperdine and won the West Coast Conference. We also have recaps of the Coastal Collegiate Sports Association, where Florida State is into the title match; Conference USA, where TCU is in the final; the We ..read more

Chase Budinger, left, and Miles Evans won in Haikou, China, in 2023/Volleyball World photo There is one USA pair left in the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour Challenge in Xiamen, China. Fourth-seeded Chase Budinger and Miles Evans, who won in Haikou, China, in 2023, play 21st-seeded Frenchmen Youssef Krou and Arnaud Gauthier-Rat in one of Sunday’s semifinals, while second-seeded Lukas Pfretzschner and Sven Winter of Germany play Marco and Esteban Grimalt of Chile. They got through the qualifier and are seeded 18th. Budinger and Evans went 1-1 in pool play, losing to Gauthier-Rat and Krou before ..read more

HERMOSA BEACH, California — They called her Susie, and for seven weeks, Susie, a 27-year-old American working a farm in rural Sicily, lived a life that Zana Muno had long dreamed of. She’d be on a bus by 8 in the morning, piling in with 13 others from around the globe, ranging from 70-year-old women from Sweden to peers her age from Germany and everywhere and every demographic between, and off they’d go, sometimes to the farm, sometimes on a field trip. There would be a lesson, coffee and cake at 10, lunch prep followed by, of course, “the most incredible lunch,” Zana said, another lesson, and ..read more

Texas A&M-Corpus Christi celebrates winning the Southland Conference In the penultimate week of the collegiate beach volleyball season, our report features a conference-by-conference breakdown of the tournaments that will determine the automatic qualifiers in the NCAA’s National Collegiate Beach Championship, a 17-team, single-elimination tournament May 3-5 in Gulf Shores, Alabama. Equally important, we dissect the chances of the logical contenders for the eight at-large bids.  The bracket will be announced on NCAA.com at 11 a.m. Eastern Sunday, April 28. Pac-12 Four programs from the ..read more

The race for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games officially began in February 2023 in Doha, Qatar, with the Volleyball World Elite16. The 2024 season began the first week of March back in Doha, and the final event of the Olympic qualification cycle will be the Ostrava Elite16, which ends on June 9. We’ll be providing these updates for the Beach Volleyball Olympic rankings after international points-earning tournaments: The rise of Cuba’s Jorge Alayo and Noslen Diaz has been as swift as it has been astonishing. Entering the 2024 beach volleyball season, they had less than 4,000 Olympic points to their ..read more

The idea was to medal in Guadalajara. For Nina Brunner and Tanja Huberli to play their first Challenge event in two years. To feel the pressure of being the one seed, the expectations of a medal. Of getting every team’s best shot, and to hand it right back, that their best wasn’t good enough. It didn’t work. It worked out better than planned. Brunner and Huberli did not medal in last weekend’s Guadalajara Challenge. Instead, they finished ninth, upset by qualifiers Sophie Bukovec and Heather Bansley. But those reps? That loss? They paved the way for a far bigger moment: A gold medal at this we ..read more

UCLA’s Merrick McHenry being Merrick McHenry against USC/Ken Williams photo Fourth-seeded Lindenwood stunned top-seeded Ball State on Thursday in the MIVA semifinals, bouncing the Cardinals in five sets to advance to Saturday’s championship match. The Lions, in the title tilt for the first time, play third-seeded Ohio State, which beat second-seeded Loyola Chicago in four. Penn State had to go four to beat Harvard, but the Nittany Lions will play George Mason, which swept Charleston, in the EIVA title match Saturday. The top two teams in the MPSF, UCLA and Grand Canyon won and meet in Saturday ..read more

As the Beach Pro Tour season has settled into its early-season stride, hitting consecutive stops in Brazil and another in Mexico, something still felt amiss. Namely, the best players. Almost all of them. Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth have played just four matches this season, Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes six. Miles Partain and Andy Benesh haven’t played at all. Their last appearance was in the Beach Pro Tour Finals in December. The spring months have been a test of patience thus far for those seeded directly into the main draws of Elite16s. Champagne problems, to say the least. These are the pai ..read more

HERMOSA BEACH, California — In the spring of 2015, Mathias Berntsen and Anders Mol, cousins united by blood as much by a hereditary passion for the sport of volleyball, sat down and mapped out the future. There was much to discuss. The members of Norway’s senior national team at the time were aging out. After the 2016 Olympic Games, the future of their country’s success would fall on the shoulders of a handful of unproven teenagers, in a federation with little infrastructure and a resume not long with success. “We sat down and said we have to do something,” Berntsen said. “We didn’t have a sy ..read more

In a beautiful scene on Alki Beach, Boise State’s Anika Christensen, who is from nearby Gig Harbor, hits against Georgia State as teammate Aris Vetter looks on/Stephen Burns photo Another UCLA-USC showdown looms large Thursday as the NCAA beach volleyball regular season winds down. It comes on the heels of UCLA’s 3-2 victory over the Trojans this past Saturday in the loaded Center of Effort Challenge at Cal Poly. UCLA has won two of the three meetings this season between the top two teams in the AVCA Collegiate Beach Poll. Speaking of which: AVCA top 20, POW AVCA COLLEGIATE BEACH POLL: The top ..read more