UCLA Beach Will Only Leave California Once in 2017 Regular Season

The beaches of California are the American hotbed for beach volleyball, and rival the sands of Brazil as the biggest beach volleyball mecca on the planet. That allows the UCLA Bruins to stay close to home while still facing a stacked competitive slate in the 2017 season.

In fact, the Bruins will only leave the state of California once in the regular season, and that’s to travel to America’s beach second-city in Miami for the FIU Surf and Turf Invitational at the end of March. That trip will be UCLA’s one chance to prepare for big road-trips, which is what their entire post-season will be. This year’s Pac-12 Championships will be held at the University of Arizona beach volleyball courts in the heart of the UA campus; and the NCAA Championships will return to Gulf Shores, Alabama.

Out of around 26 matches this season (depending on how the FIU invite schedule plays out), 8 will be played in iconic Manhattan Beach, where the team has never played an official match in its 4 years as a varsity program at UCLA.

The lack of travel won’t mean a lack of competition, however. UCLA will play NCAA-qualifying programs from USC (twice), Pepperdine, Georgia State, Florida State, and Arizona. This means that they’ll play 5 of the other 7 teams that participated in last year’s NCAA tournament, with the exceptions being Stetson and Hawaii (the latter of whom USC had played in each of the last two seasons in a home-and-home series). The Bruins make up for that by playing the defending national champions, and the teams’ chief rival across all sports, USC – once early in the season on March 4th, and again to finish the regular season on April 22nd.

The Bruins will also play LSU, who finished last season ranked 10th in the final AVCA polls and just outside of the 8-team NCAA tournament.

In 2016, UCLA beach lost in the opening round of the tournament to the aforementioned Hawaii, but beat Stetson, Pepperdine, and Hawaii in a rematch to advance back to the main bracket. There, they lost 3-1 to Florida State.