Tigers look for another opening round upset
The first spring championship of 2025 is here, and I’m here to cover it.
The LSU beach volleyball team has made the trip down to Gulf Shores, Alabama, for the 2025 NCAA National Collegiate Beach Volleyball Championship tournament, their eighth appearance in the nine years of the tournament’s history. The Tigers were the final at-large team into the 16-team tournament and earned the #11 overall seed. Today, they’ll face #6 overall seed Cal Poly in the final dual of the first round. The earliest time at which the game can start is 3:00, but it’s highly likely that other matches will push the start time back past 3:30. The match will be broadcast on ESPN2, but if you have ESPN+, I would suggest you use that to watch each court instead since the network does commercial breaks during the action. For information on the seven games that precede LSU’s match, check out this handy cheat sheet I made.
How does a game work?
Just so we’re all on the same page, here’s how a dual works. Each game, known as a dual, consists of five matches. These matches consist of a pair from one team against a pair from the other team. The first two sets of each match are played to 21 points, and a tiebreaking third set is played to 15 points (in both cases, a team must lead by two points to win a set). When a pair wins a match, they earn a point for their team towards the overall dual score. Duals end when one team scores three points. For the opening round, all five matches start at the same time to get through each one as quickly as possible.
#11 LSU vs #6 Cal Poly preview
Cal Poly enters this tournament after dropping the Big West Championship final to Long Beach State. The 29-7 Mustangs are 7-7 against tournament teams and 5-5 against tournament teams when excluding results against LBSU. Their most impressive wins came in early April when they beat UCLA 3-2 and then beat Loyola Marymount 3-2. UCLA and LMU are the #1 and #4 seeds in this tournament, respectively. Both of those teams beat Cal Poly in other matches, though.
LSU enters this tournament after an underwhelming showing at the CCSA Championship. After a 3-1 loss to Florida State, the Tigers struggled to beat South Carolina 3-1 to avoid elimination. The next day, FSU swept the Tigers 3-0. LSU has had some big wins this year, notably wins over Cal, USC and Long Beach State, though the latter two came at home. LSU has found some strange magic on the sand of Gulf Shores. Just last year, #11 LSU pulled off a shocking run to the semifinals by knocking off #6 TCU and #3 Stanford.
LSU has never been eliminated from the NCAA tournament without getting a win, and they are 3-0 all-time against Cal Poly. That said, LSU’s last dual against the Mustangs came back in 2019, a time when both programs were in different spots. The Tigers have a strong advantage on the 5s compared to most teams, but they are weaker on the 2s. That means it’s probably going to come down to some combination of courts 1, 3 and 4 to find an upset win.
There is about a 20-30% chance of rain all day today. Hopefully none of that rain messes with the schedule of the tournament today, because tomorrow is going to be a nightmare (thunderstorms all day).