All four Southern California teams came awfully close to advancing to the second round of the NCAA Beach Volleyball Championships.
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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.
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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.
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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