TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – The Florida State beach volleyball team will hold the No. 3 seed in the fifth edition of the NCAA Beach Volleyball Championship. Florida State opens the tournament against sixth-seeded Stanford on Friday, May 7 at 1:00 pm ET.
“We are so excited to just get this NCAA Tournament started and see the selections for the bracket,” said head coach Brooke Niles. “We can now really prepare for the teams in front of us and the first team is Stanford. Their assistant coach Angela Rock and I go way back. I played with their head coach, Andrew Fuller’s wife for a few years internationally and he actually coached us some. I think we are all really familiar with each other and they have great players and we have great players. It is going to be a really good battle. We are just really excited to get started.”
Florida State is the only program in the nation to make an appearance in every national championship event, starting with the AVCA Championship (2012-15) and now the NCAA Championship (2016-19, 2021). FSU finished as the national runner-up in 2014, 2016 and 2018. The Noles also posted back-to-back top-three finishes in 2012 and 2013.
“It means a lot for the culture of Florida State to be the only team to make every AVCA and NCAA Tournament,” said Niles. “We don’t want to be thought of as just another east coast school, we want to compete for a national championship every year and getting there is half of the battle. Getting selected every year is an important stepping stone to where we want to be.”
The Seminoles head into the national championship riding a streak of 10 consecutive victories, and just two weeks after claiming the team’s fifth consecutive CCSA Championship. Florida State is the only beach volleyball program in the country to win five straight conference championships.
FSU saw 14 opponents ranked in the AVCA Top-10 this season with 11wins, and played 25 matches against teams ranked in the Top-20 with a 21-4 record in those matches. The Seminoles only lost to one team that did not make the NCAA Tournament and posted sweeps in 17 matches this season without being swept once.
The 2021 NCAA Beach Volleyball Championship will feature a double elimination, bracket play tournament with the two remaining schools playing a winner-take-all match on Sunday at 1:30 pm ET.
The 2021 Beach Volleyball Championship provides for a field of eight teams to compete in a double-elimination tournament. The NCAA Women’s Beach Volleyball Committee conducts team selections, selecting the top three teams from the East Region and the top three teams from the West Region. The remaining two teams are selected at-large from across the country by the NCAA Women’s Beach Volleyball Committee.
FSU vs. the NCAA Championship Field:
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