NCAA Beach Volleyball Championship


The NCAA Beach Volleyball Championship is an NCAA-sanctioned tournament to determine the national champions of collegiate women's beach volleyball. It is a National Collegiate Championship featuring teams from Division I, Division II and Division III, and is the 90th, and newest, NCAA championship event. It was the first new NCAA championship to be created since the NCAA Division III Men's Volleyball Championship in 2012, and the first for women since the NCAA Bowling Championship in 2004.

History

The championship was approved by the NCAA Convention during the fall of 2015, and a committee was selected to determine the tournament's organizational structure. Before 2015, sand volleyball had been part of the NCAA Emerging Sports for Women program. As such, a separate championship had been contested annually, since 2012, by the American Volleyball Coaches Association. Before 2012 several championships were televised by Collegiate Nationals. As of 2015, over 50 schools had sponsored sand volleyball, ten more than the total number of required programs.
The sport's name was changed from "sand volleyball" to the more usual "beach volleyball" in June 2015, and the committee overseeing the sport is now named the NCAA Beach Volleyball Committee.

Structure

The championship is held each May and consists of eight teams playing in a double-elimination style tournament with a single-elimination final, under standard beach volleyball rules. All matches consist of five sets, with each team needing to win three sets to advance.
The NCAA does not add automatic qualifiers until two championship seasons have passed; but in 2016, the top 3 teams from the east and west were given automatic bids with 2 additional teams invited at-large.
As of fall 2019, seven conferences sponsor beach volleyball, all with at least six members — the minimum number for a conference to qualify for an automatic bid to other NCAA championship tournaments. Five of these conferences were represented in the inaugural tournament; the exceptions are the Ohio Valley Conference and Southland Conference, both of which begin beach volleyball sponsorship in the upcoming 2020 season.

Summary

Cumulative results

Result by school and by year

Thirteen teams have appeared in the NCAA Tournament in at least one year starting with 2016. The results for all years are shown in this table below.
The code in each cell represents the furthest the team made it in the respective tournament:
APP16171819
School
USC4''
UCLA4''
Florida State4
Pepperdine4
Hawaii4
LSU3
South Carolina2
Stetson2
Arizona1
Georgia State1
Long Beach State1
Florida International1
Cal Poly1

Broadcasting

held broadcast rights to the tournament for the first two years, with early-round coverage airing on TruTV, and the championship game broadcast on TBS. In December 2017, ESPN signed a multiyear agreement to broadcast the NCAA Women's Beach Volleyball Championship through 2022.