Tawa’s Club Dots: “Preview of what landscape of college volleyball looks like for the next few years”

This is “Dots,” VolleyballMag.com’s weekly look at 10 things in club volleyball, past or present, that interest me and hopefully will interest you. Look for Dots every Tuesday through Junior Nationals this summer:

• Friday morning at 8 a.m. in Columbus, Ohio, 48 teams will get underway in the USA Volleyball 18s Junior National Championships to try to determine which team is the best of the best from the qualified 18 Open field.

A total of 271 additional teams will compete in six lower-level divisions – 48 in 18 National, 48 in 18 USA, 48 in 18 Freedom, 64 in 18 American, 32 in 18 Liberty and 31 in 18 Patriot. Most of these teams will be chock full of seniors playing in the final club tournament of their careers.

If this is the end of your organized volleyball journey, we wish you well and hope you take away a lifetime of fond memories of sweaty kneepads, organized cheers, early-morning wakeup calls, matching scrunchies, late-night pizza, podium finishes and celebratory hugs. Thank you for  being part of this world. We will miss you.

• Seeds and pools came out for the biggest prize — 18 Open – yesterday. Drive Nation 18 Red – no surprise – is No. 1 overall. Jason Nicholson’s team won Triple Crown and went 28-1 in three qualifier wins. Coast 18-Ozhan is seeded second. The San Diego squad finished runner up to Drive Nation at Triple Crown, won three of the four SCVA Region events it participated in and won the Red Rock Rave qualifier.

Drive Nation and Coast also are 1-2 in our national top 25, the forensic review of which was completed on Friday.

What about the other seeds? Well, in our opinion there are some teams seeded too high and others too low.

Too high: No. 3 Gainesville Juniors 17/18 (FL); No. 15 FC Elite 18 Elite (WI)

Too low:  No. 12 NPJ 18 Forefront (OR); No. 20 Elevation 18 Spinney

We have Gainesville ranked sixteenth nationally. Seeing that team, which is led by setter Jalyn Stout, as the third overall seed, made us do a double take. We see how “the Committee” might have fallen in love with a resume that includes two qualifier wins and a second-place finish, but the wins at NEQ and Southeast, were against small, weak fields. The second-place finish at Florida Fest was more impressive. Gainesville had its best…