Long Beach State men’s volleyball falls to Hawai’i in NCAA semifinals

LOS ANGELES — Third-seeded Long Beach State has missed out on a second straight NCAA men’s volleyball championship game after falling to second-seeded Hawai’i 3-1 (15-25, 25-18, 21-25, 22-25) on Saturday night at Pauley Pavilion.

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“Everybody’s going to feel it,” first-year LBSU head coach Nick McRae told reporters. “It is all about how you respond to the moment, but it’s OK to feel it in live time, because it means you put your blood, sweat, and tears and your soul into it, striving to go for it. All 17 guys have gone through it.”

The Rainbow Warriors will play unseeded UC Irvine, which beat fourth-seeded Ball State in the championship game on Monday.

Skyler Varga led LBSU with 13 kills and hit .290. Wojciech Gajek had 11 kills and Sage Hill High School product Jackson Cryst had a team-high four blocks. LBSU hit .200 as a team, which was its lowest hitting percentage since recording .193 against UCLA on Feb. 6.

Four Rainbow Warriors reached double digits in kills in Kristian Titriyski (14), Louis Sakanoko (12) and Adrien Roure (10). Justin Todd registered 10 blocks. Hawai’i out-blocked Long Beach State 14.5 to 6.

It was the fourth time that the two Big West Conference teams had met this season, most recently in the conference championship when LBSU took the ‘Bows to five sets for the title.

Long Beach State both hit and served uncharacteristically poorly in the first set on Saturday evening, finishing with a .120 hitting percentage to go with nine service errors. Hawai’i walked away with a 25-15 win on a block by Roure and Todd.

The Beach had a first-round bye in the tournament before sweeping unseeded Loyola Chicago in the regional finals at the Pyramid — their home court. Getting up to play a highly-seeded team like Hawai’i in the semifinals wasn’t a challenge, McRae said, due to the intense all-around competition in men’s volleyball right now.

“Everybody that was in the tournament was ranked nationally, so it was a great competition,” he said. “The beauty in our sport is every single weekend we’re playing a top 20 team. Anybody can win. It’s a dogfight. Guys are duking it out in really good volleyball games.”

The second set was a dramatic turnaround, and LBSU led for nearly the entirety of the frame to put it away 25-18 on a Hawai’i service error.

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Mira Costa High School alumnus Tread Rosenthal jumped up for a solo block to cut Long Beach’s lead to 10-9 early on. The teams traded service errors, then Connor Bloom’s kill from the left side gave Long Beach a 13-11 that it could build on.

LBSU improved its hitting percentage to .273 by the end of the second set, and Varga, a first-team All-American, had upped his kill total to seven. But what gave LBSU its final push was a call reversal that came when head coach Nick MacRae challenged a ruling on a Bloom kill.

The reversal gave Long Beach a 21-18 lead and carried them to the win.

Hawai’i resumed its dominance in the latter half of the third set. The score was knotted at 15-all when Long Beach committed a service error and allowed the Rainbow Warriors to gain a lead that it didn’t relinquish.

The Warriors scored in bunches, while unforced errors hurt Long Beach State. Cryst and Gajeck had back-to-back kills to close the gap to 24-21, but Hawai’i claimed the set on LBSU’s 15th service error of the match.

Cryst, a 6-foot-10 freshman middle blocker, started off the fourth set with back-to-back service aces. He’s one of 10 underclassmen on the team who have gained valuable experience in the postseason.

“That’s the poetry of NCAA sports, it’s those first-time guys who had not been in the moment,” McRae said. “You’re trying to expedite the lessons learned from (upperclassmen) that are staying in that moment again and again. And if these (upperclassmen) are going through that moment, we’re going to have full trust in these guys that are going through it for the first time.”

The two Big West foes went point-for-point in the final set until Titriyski and Todd combined for a block that brought the score to 23-21 in Hawai’i’s favor. A kill by Roure set up match point, and Titriyski delivered the final scoring strike to send his team to the final.

Long Beach State was making its ninth semifinal appearance in the last 10 years and, heading into this year’s tournament, had reached the championship game in five out of the last seven tournaments.

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