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2019 NCAA NC Men's Volleyball Championship

Possible Long Beach State-Hawaii Clash Highlights Men's NCAA Tournament

Possible Long Beach State-Hawaii Clash Highlights Men's NCAA Tournament

Six NCAA men’s volleyball teams make the trip to Long Beach, California, this week for the 2019 NCAA men’s volleyball championships.

Apr 30, 2019 by Megan Kaplon
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Six NCAA men’s volleyball teams make the trip to Long Beach, California, this week for the 2019 NCAA men’s volleyball championships.

The cast of competitors vying for the 2019 title includes almost-perfect No. 1 seed Hawaii,  which didn’t lose a set until three months into the season and lost just two matches all year. Then there’s tournament host and No. 2 seed Long Beach State, led by a trio of senior First Team All-Americans and looking to earn a repeat national title.

On April 20, Hawaii downed Long Beach in five sets in the Big West championship match to earned the conference’s automatic berth into the NCAA Tournament. Long Beach, which was ranked No. 1 for the first 12 weeks of the season, was unsurprisingly granted one of two at-large bids into the national postseason. As the top two seeds, Hawaii and Long Beach earned byes into Thursday’s semifinals.

Pepperdine scored its spot in the bracket as champion of the MPSF, while Lewis (MIVA), and Princeton (EIVA) did the same in their respective leagues. Princeton defeated Barton, winner of the Conference Carolinas, in the NCAA play-in match last Thursday. 

Finally, there’s USC, which secured an at-large bid thanks to what was one of the toughest schedules in the country and wins over seven teams ranked in the top 10 at the time. The Trojans are also the only team, other than Hawaii, to hand Long Beach a loss in 2019.

Quarterfinal #1 USC vs. Lewis

Tuesday, April 30, 5 PM PT

USC and Lewis play in the first of two quarterfinals on Tuesday night. For fourth-year USC head coach Jeff Nygaard, the equation is simple.

“When we play good, we have success. When we play great, we do amazing things. And when we play medium, we open ourselves up to lose,” he said. 

Of the teams remaining in the hunt for the national title, Lewis is the only team USC has not played at least once this season. Nygaard credits the Trojans’ tough schedule for getting them ready to compete at the highest level.

He explained it by harkening back to his days playing professional beach volleyball. 

“It was interesting when in a practice round that somebody found something that was a weakness or a hole in my game and then they just hit me over the head with it,” he said. “They will win in the short term, but what they’re really doing is they’re teaching you and educating you and giving you the space to improve at that skill that you may not have known that you were weak at.” 

Playing the top teams in the country throughout the season helped the USC men identify and improve upon their weaknesses and likely helped set up the Trojans to pull off that massive upset of Long Beach in straight sets on March 23.

USC's performance in 2019 is even more impressive considering it finished the 2018 season with an 8-20 record, 3-7 in the MPSF. The team's catch-phrase for the year—"Resurgence"—captures the spirit of the 2019 Trojans.


"[USC] maybe made the most progress when it comes from where they started from in the national rankings to where they ended up," Long Beach State head coach Alan Knipe said.

Lewis brings a very experienced team into the 2019 tournament. Five of the Flyers’ seven seniors redshirted in 2015 when Lewis won the national championship. Today, one of those redshirt seniors, Julian Moses, ranks second on the team with 233 kills and was named the MVP of the MIVA tournament. Senior setter Matt Yoshimoto is in his third season as a starter, and also happens to lead the nation in aces per set with 0.66. Ryan Coenen, the 2017 AVCA Newcomer of the Year, leads Lewis with 312 kills.


And don’t forget Tyler Mitchem, who has the best hitting percentage in the country (.505) and ranks 10th nationally with 1.11 blocks per set. 

“[Lewis has] an extremely good record and they’ve dominated their league and they’re going to be extremely confident,” Nygaard said. “They’re senior heavy so they’re going to have experience, they’re going to be physical. It’s going to be an interesting matchup and a fun matchup because I know that they’re going to be competitive and they’re going to come in and be hungry.” 

Quarterfinal #2: Princeton vs. Pepperdine

Tuesday, April 30, 7:30 PM PT

Princeton and Pepperdine started their seasons playing each other, and one of the two teams will end its season the same way. 

The Dec. 30 match between the Waves and the Tigers saw Pepperdine get the win in four, but both head coaches admit that meeting doesn’t tell them too much about the opponent they’ll face on the court Tuesday night.


Princeton’s preseason sent the team on road trips to California (twice), Indiana, and Virginia, to seek out the best teams in the country. The Tigers won just two matches in the first month of the season, but by the time conference play rolled around, you’d have to say they had figured it out. Hardly phased by the competition in the EIVA, Princeton lost just one match the entire league season and won the conference championship.

“[Scheduling tough has] been our M.O. for the last couple of years,” Shweisky said, “but last year in particular, we went 1-11 and all of a sudden something clicked and then we went 12-4, and we upset the No. 1 seed in the conference, and we went to the conference finals last year. So scheduling for this year, the guys were like, ‘Yeah, let’s just bite off as hard a schedule as we can.’”

Juniors George Huhmann (the recently crowned 2019 EIVA Player of the Year), Parker Dixon, and Greg Luck account for almost 75 percent of Princeton’s offense. 

“Part of what makes [Huhmann, Dixon, and Luck] so good, obviously, they’re just very talented, but they all started as freshman and so kind of getting battle tested,” Shweisky said. “We went to Hawaii their freshman year and played a really great Hawaii team and Ball State, and we went out to BYU their freshman year, and last year played a bunch of great teams. This year, back out to California twice and back out to BYU to play BYU and Hawaii. The more times you put those guys in front of great players, they’re going to try to assimilate and rise to that level.”

For his team, Pepperdine head coach David Hunt highlighted the importance of the serve-pass game and offensive distribution. 

“Our three pins take the most swings. So Michael Wexter, Dave Wieczorek, and Kaleb Denmark,” Hunt said. “And then Rob[ert Mullahey] being able to distribute the ball effectively depending on where we feel the opponent is weakest. I don’t think Rob gets enough credit for what he does.

“If we have to rely on one guy, and we become one-dimensional, then it gets tough.”


In order to compete with Pepperdine, which went 22-6 on the year and comes into the quarters on a seven-match win streak (with the last five victories coming in straight sets), Shweisky told his team they’ll have to play super clean.

“Wieczorek is one of the best players in the country, top two or three outside hitters in the country, incredibly physical, incredibly talented,” Shweisky said. “They have a very good team. There’s really not a lot of weaknesses or things you can exploit.

“We’re going to have to be really dialed in on every point because they don’t let you breathe. That’s what the great teams do,” he continued. “If you want to be great, you have to be great every point. You can’t take a point off and forget the setter’s front row or something like that.”

The quarterfinal between Princeton and Pepperdine will also feature a pair of excellent, and perhaps underappreciated liberos. On the Princeton side, there’s senior Corry Short, who Shweisky describes as another coach. For Pepperdine, there’s junior Noah Dyer, who after battling for an outside hitting spot his first two seasons has settled into the libero role where he anchors the Waves’ serve receive.

Top Seeds Await Quarterfinal Winners

Coaches hate talking about any match except the one right in front of them, but luckily sportswriters don’t have that same superstition. Long Beach State and Hawaii have been the undisputed top teams in the country all season long, and barring a major upset it should be No. 1 versus No. 2 in Saturday’s national championship match.

The current rivalry between these two teams really began last year, when they split a pair of five-set regular season matches before Long Beach State got the sweep in the 2018 Big West championship match, effectively denying Hawaii a spot in the NCAA Tournament.

This year, they didn’t play each other until April 12, the final weekend of the regular season. A pair of back-to-back matches saw Long Beach State win both in five. Just a week later, Hawaii won the Big West title in yet another five-set battle.

“I thought it was great for the game this year that these two teams that were having these really good seasons, that we didn’t play each other until the last weekend, so it had just a lot of drama that builds up because of the way that the schedule played out and obviously the seasons that the two teams were having,” Long Beach State head coach Alan Knipe said. “To be able to get them both times here in five and lose a close one in five over there, but have sold out facilities in both places, I just think it’s tremendous for the growth of our game.”


Following the 2018 national championship, Long Beach State graduated six seniors (only two of whom played significant minutes), but Knipe stressed that their departure still challenged his team to develop a new identity. 

“It’s really easy from the outside [to say] that the national championship team from last year should just be right back in it, but we did lose six seniors last year, not a lot of them were starters, but it’s a huge chunk of your culture in your gym,” Knipe said. “This team had to find its own way on how to push each other and how to get our training gym up to a level that is acceptable for our standards.”

The 2019 LBSU senior class includes outside hitter T.J. DeFalco, opposite Kyle Ensing, and setter Josh Tuaniga, all of whom have started since their freshman season. Over four seasons, the trio has accumulated more accolades than could fit in this article, but the most recent include 2019 First Team All-American honors for all three and a Big West Player of the Year award for Ensing.


“They’re just great people and they’re unselfish and they make guys around them better,” Knipe said of his star seniors. “You know you have a great culture when your most talented and highly acclaimed players come in the gym every day and are your hardest working guys also.”

Long Beach State may have a 2-1 lead over Hawaii in the season series, but when it comes to All-American awards, the Warriors one-uped the Beach this year. UH put a record four athletes on the first team: Bulgaria native Rado Parapunov, Stijn Van Tilburg (aka SVT) of the Netherlands, and brothers Gage and Joe Worsley, who play libero and setter, respectively. 


Parapunov tops the UH stats sheet with 356 kills, but senior outside hitter Van Tilburg, who has earned three First Team All-American selections in his four seasons at UH, is close behind with 329 and boasts the second-best hitting percentage in the country (.473), an impressive feat for an outside hitter.

With Joe Worsley at the controls, Hawaii’s offense ranks No. 1 in the country in hitting percentage (.442), kills per set (14.21), and assists per set (13.32). 

“I don’t think it’s a secret that UH and Long Beach have been consistent performers this entire season,” USC’s Nygaard said. “They’ve found a way to compete at a high level consistently.”

If Nygaard’s Trojans are able to defeat Lewis in the quarterfinals, they’d face Hawaii for the second time this season after losing in straight sets to the Warriors back in January. Of course, with the Lewis match still to play, Nygaard wouldn’t say much about the possibility of taking on Hawaii in the semis, but he provided an excellent summary of what each of the six remaining teams in the tournament is facing.

“Here’s what I’ll say about advancing: if you get blessed and you get to win the national title, you’re going to go against the best teams in the nation,” Nygaard said. “There’s no doubt about that. You’re going to go and play UH next round and then, who knows who is going to shake out from the next one, because this is the end where there is no safety net. Long Beach, Pepperdine, Princeton, you’re going to be playing a team that is peaking and doing great things. In order to win the national title, you’re going to have to play your best against the best, and there will be no doubt as to if you are blessed to win it that you’ve earned it.”