South Carolina beach volleyball clinches trip to NCAA Tournament
The South Carolina beach volleyball program will be dancing in the sand of Gulf Shores, Alabama, as it was announced Sunday night that the Gamecocks made the field of eight teams for the NCAA tournament. It is the first postseason berth ever for the team, and it will face the defending national champion Southern Cal at 10 a.m. eastern time Friday morning.
Congratulations to No. 8 seed @GamecockBeachVB!#NCAABeachVB pic.twitter.com/vcwm6Hj7Z8
— NCAA Volleyball (@NCAAVolleyball) April 30, 2017
“Unbelievable. I think we’ve been riding a roller coaster all week,” head coach Moritz Moritz said in a release. “We definitely believed that we had done a lot of hard work throughout the entire season, we just weren’t sure if it was enough. We’re just super grateful to be in this position, to be in the conversation first of all and then to take this next step was huge for us.”
The Gamecocks racked up a program-record 23 wins during the regular season. Of those 23 wins, five came against AVCA Top-15 opponents. Individually, Macie Tendrich set the school record for wins in a season with 27, and ten different Gamecocks won 20 or more matches as individuals.
The tournament is a double-elimination format. The winner of USC’s match will face the winner of the No. 5 Hawai’i and No. 4 Florida State match on Saturday at 3 p.m., and the losers will match up at 1 p.m. Friday afternoon. South Carolina and Southern Cal squared off earlier this season at the Gamecock Grand Slam on March 25, with the Trojans winning 5-0.
This story was originally published April 30, 2017 at 8:48 PM.