Another UCLA-USC showdown looms large Thursday as the NCAA beach volleyball regular season winds down.
It comes on the heels of UCLA’s 3-2 victory over the Trojans this past Saturday in the loaded Center of Effort Challenge at Cal Poly. UCLA has won two of the three meetings this season between the top two teams in the AVCA Collegiate Beach Poll.
Speaking of which:
AVCA top 20, POW
AVCA COLLEGIATE BEACH POLL: The top four — UCLA, USC, Stanford and Florida State — stayed the same, but Cal Poly jumped two spots into a tie with FSU. It ties the best ranking in Cal Poly history.
TCU dropped one notch to No. 6. Long Beach State stayed seventh, Cal is still No. 8, but Loyola Marymount moved up a spot to No. 9, trading places with No. LSU.
The next five are Hawai’i, Washington, Arizona State, FIU and Georgia State.
Numbers 16-20 are Stetson, Grand Canyon, FAU, Arizona and South Carolina, which moved in while Texas A&M-Corpus Christi — off last week — dropped out.
Click here for the AVCA top 20.
PAIR OF THE WEEK: The AVCA gave a nod to the small schools this week in honoring Hanni Johnson and Amanda Ollinger of Division II Colorado Mesa. Johnson, a 5-fot-9 senior from Anchorage, Alaska, and Ollinger, a 6-1 graduate student from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who played basketball — not volleyball — for Iowa from 2016-20. She played volleyball in high school. Johnson and Ollinger went 4-0 last week for the program located in Grand Junction, Colorado, without losing a set. The Mavericks took third at the AVCA Small College Beach Championships in Tavares, Florida.
Colorado Mesa had this feature last week about Ollinger and teammate Cedar Bellows.
Center of Effort Challenge
The big gathering last weekend was in San Luis Obispo at Cal Poly’s Center of Effort and top-ranked UCLA, which has won 19 duals in a row, went 4-0 to improve to 28-4. Since losing three of their first four duals, the Bruins have lost only to Stanford five weeks ago. At Cal Poly, they had to go the distance in all four of their matches, winning 3-2 each time against Loyola Marymount, Florida State, Cal Poly and USC.
Against USC, the match was tied 2-2 when UCLA’s court 5 pair of Tessa Van Winkle and Jaden Witmarsh beat USC’s Madison Goellner and Mabyn Thomas 14-21, 21-17, 15-10.
USC’s Megan Kraft and Delaynie Maple…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Volleyballmag.com…