NCAA Division I Women's Volleyball National Championship

November Madness!!!!???

The NCAA Division I Women's Volleyball National Championship selections and the brackets have been announced.

To see the NCAA interactive bracket (which will also be live updated during the tournament) - http://www.ncaa.com/interactive-bracket/volleyball-women/d1

From the ncaa.com website:

The NCAA Division I Women’s Volleyball committee announced the 64-team field that will compete in the 2017 NCAA Division I Women’s Volleyball Championship. Thirty-two conferences were awarded an automatic qualification, while the remaining 32 positions were filled with at-large selections to complete the bracket.

The top 16 teams were seeded nationally and placed within four regions. Penn State earned the top seed followed by No. 2 Florida. Defending national champion Stanford earned the third seed while Kentucky rounded out the top four. 

The Pac-12 led all conferences with nine teams selected from their league to compete in the championship tournament.  The Big Ten Conference was second with eight programs advancing to the tournament. Pennsylvania St. and Stanford are the only two teams that have earned berths to all 37 championship tournaments. 


A few comments from your favorite online former college volleyball coach....

• 9 Teams from one conference is a bit much...
• Having competed in the Pac 10 as a player (I still haven't admitted Colorado and Utah into the conference), I am proud to see so many teams of quality, but I can't imagine the thrill of saying, "Hey, we got 9th place in our conference, what a great year!!!"
• Kentucky a #4 seed?  Didn't see that coming....
• No mention of any television coverage, other than the Semi's and Finals being on ESPN/ESPN 2.  For the most popular women's sport in the USA, we sure can't seem to get television coverage for our championship.  Women's Basketball and Softball seem to have a whole bunch more of their "championship" contests on TV.

I won't bore you and embarrass myself with a round by round selections of W's, but my picks for the Final Four:

1)  Penn State - Yup, going out on a limb with this pick.  I think an interesting match in that region could be #9 Creighton playing #8 Washington...

2) Nebraska - I think the No Show the Huskers pulled at the last Final Four, will motivate them to get to Kansas City and then play very well at the Championship.  We will see if Kentucky is truly the #4 seed, by beating #5 Nebraska....

3) Stanford - Lots of talented Sophomores who had the cake last year; hard to repeat but they have a coach with something to prove.  Texas must have had the weakest strength of schedule this year because they brought at 27-2 record and were given an #11 seed; that could be huge motivation to get over the Cardinal in the Regional Final....

4)  Minnesota - This is my contrarian pick of the bracket.  Florida is very good, as their 25-1 record shows, but Minnesota has to grind out a crazy tough Big 10 schedule....and, one of my NCSA co-workers played at Minnesota and will be working with me at the NCAA Final Four and College Coaches Convention!

Best of luck to all the NCAA teams!