Officials for the National Invitational Volleyball Championship have announced the 32 teams (20 Automatic Qualifiers and 12 At Large) and first-round details for the 2017 postseason tournament, which has been revived after its six-year run from 1989-1995.
The 32-team field features 17 programs with 18 or more wins and five schools that finished first in regular-season conference play (Albany, North Texas, Sacramento State, Stephen F. Austin, and Maryland Eastern Shore). Additionally, six schools in the field are ranked or receiving votes in the latest Volleyball Magazine Mid-Major poll with No. 12 North Texas, No. 16 UC Irvine, No. 20 SMU, No. 23 Sacramento State, No. 24 Rice, and Texas State (RV). In all, 23 conferences will be represented with both the Big 12 and American featuring three teams each. The Sun Belt, Mountain West, SEC, Horizon, and C-USA will each have two schools competing. The SWAC, America East, MAC, Big South, Patriot, Missouri Valley, Summit, West Coast, Big Sky, Ohio Valley, Southland, ACC, Colonial, Big West, Southern, and MEAC with one. “You can already feel the enthusiasm and desire within the rosters and coaching staffs of these 32 programs,” said NIVC event director Sean Hardy. “As college basketball has come to appreciate over time with the WNIT and NIT, so much can be accomplished when deserving teams get to continue their schedule and build a framework for success next season.” Tournament Field AQ = Automatic Qualifier School Record Conference AQ Alabama A&M 14-19 SWAC AQ Albany 11-14 America East Arkansas State 20-11 Sun Belt Boise State 17-13 Mountain West AQ Bowling Green 17-11 Mid-American AQ Campbell 20-11 Big South Colgate 18-10 Patriot AQ Georgia 19-10 SEC Green Bay 15-15 Horizon AQ Illinois State 20-11 Missouri Valley IUPUI 16-14 Horizon AQ North Texas 28-3 C-USA Ole Miss 17-14 SEC AQ Oral Roberts 15-13 Summit AQ Pacific 15-13 West Coast Rice 21-8 C-USA AQ Sacramento State 26-9 Big Sky AQ SIUE 23-6 Ohio Valley SMU 20-9 American AQ Stephen F. Austin 26-7 Southland AQ Syracuse 19-12 ACC TCU 11-16 Big 12 AQ Temple 17-9 American AQ Texas State 24-9 Sun Belt Texas Tech 15-13 Big 12 AQ Towson 26-5 Colonial AQ UC Irvine 21-7 Big West UCF 17-13 American UNC Greensboro 19-11 Southern AQ UMES 27-8 MEAC AQ West Virginia 16-12 Big 12 AQ Wyoming 17-13 Mountain West Round One Tuesday, Nov. 28 At Pacific Sacramento State vs. UC Irvine, 7:30 p.m. ET Boise State vs. Pacific, 10 p.m. ET At Georgia UNC Greensboro vs. UCF, 4 p.m. ET Alabama A&M vs. Georgia, 7 p.m. ET At West Virginia Campbell vs. Temple, 4:30 p.m. ET UMES vs. West Virginia, 7 p.m. ET Wednesday, Nov. 29 At Ole Miss Arkansas State vs. SIUE, 4 p.m. ET Stephen F. Austin vs. Ole Miss, 7 p.m. ET Thursday, Nov. 30 At North Texas Wyoming vs. TCU, 5 p.m. ET Oral Roberts vs. North Texas, 8 p.m. ET At Green Bay IUPUI vs. Illinois State, 4:30 p.m. ET Bowling Green vs. Green Bay, 7 p.m. ET At Texas State Texas Tech vs. SMU, 5 p.m. ET Rice vs. Texas State, 7:30 p.m. ET At Colgate Albany vs. Syracuse, 4:30 p.m. ET Towson vs. Colgate, 7 p.m. ET Officials for the 2017 National Invitational Volleyball Championship announced 15 schools that have received and accepted automatic berths into the postseason event. The complete 32-team field will be announced on Sunday, Nov. 26 around 10 p.m. ET following NCAA Tournament selections.
“After a nearly 22-year hiatus, we are excited to announce the first 15 schools that have received and accepted an automatic berth into the 2017 event,” said NIVC director Sean Hardy. “We are still waiting on a few other AQ’s from several conferences, but we are excited to see the 32-team field getting closer and closer to reality.” Conference School America East Albany American Temple Big Sky Sacramento State Colonial College of Charleston C-USA North Texas MAC Bowling Green MEAC Maryland Eastern Shore Mountain West Wyoming Northeast Bryant Ohio Valley SIUE Southland Stephen F. Austin Summit Oral Roberts Sun Belt Texas State SWAC Alabama A&M West Coast Pacific The 2017 tournament will consist of 32 teams with participating schools hosting all matches. A team is offered an automatic berth by the NIVC when it’s the highest-finishing team in its conference regular-season standings, and is not selected for the NCAA Tournament. Should a conference’s automatic qualifier team decline the NIVC invitation, then the conference forfeits its AQ spot and that berth goes into the at-large pool. FORT COLLINS, Colo. -- Tournament officials for the 2017 National Invitational Volleyball Championship (NIVC) have announced a format change for the event as Selection Day (Nov. 26) draws closer.
The tournament field will consist of 32 teams, with matches in Rounds 1 and 2 held back-to-back on Nov. 28-Dec. 1 at eight of the participating schools. The event will play through the championship game, hosted at one of the two remaining schools and broadcast on ESPN3. The NIVC was originally played from 1989-1995. With the support of those founders, the current NIVC will feature automatic qualifiers who are the teams with the best conference finishes that were not selected for the NCAA Tournament. The committee will select the remainder of the field based on court performance throughout this season. “The NIVC opportunity has been bubbling up in conversation with coaches and administrators for years. We had nearly 60 teams send in contracts for this year, and to provide the best experience in 2017 we’ve decided the 32-team format is preferred,” said NIVC director Sean Hardy. “We will learn a lot running the NIVC this year and are excited to make it part of everyone’s volleyball calendar going forward. Some deserving programs are sent home early after conference tournaments are finished, and the NIVC is a great vehicle to showcase them and grow the rest of the sport.” Much like the WNIT and NIT events in college basketball, the NIVC taps into the impressive depth of D-I volleyball and is designed to give more high-performing, highly skilled programs a chance to play for a postseason title. Teams with young rosters get to train and compete with an eye to the future; established rosters get one more chance to play together and memorably cap off their student-athlete experience. Someday, the 2017 Albany volleyball roster will get together again and have a good laugh about the start to their season.
How does 50 years sound? It might take a generation or three to get the distance needed to reflect back with a smile on the nearly four-week blender through which the program suffered. The 0-12 start in four tournaments saw the Great Danes win just three sets, and it doesn’t take much imagination to say the mood in the locker room at times was a bit bleak. But Albany and coach MJ Engstrom sifted through the wreckage and built something durable for the second half of the campaign. The team now sits at 10-1 in the America East Conference, clinching the top seed in next week’s tournament that will determine the AE automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament with one regular-season match to go, Friday at Stony Brook. Engstrom agreed that just about every resource in her coaching capacity was called upon to steer the team –- with seven freshmen and four sophomores -– past the hurt feelings and dark moods of August and September. “I like to schedule tough in the beginning and challenge our players; obviously I misjudged where we were emotionally, more than anything. That’s what we talked about, coming into practice and not thinking they had failed, in any sense,” said Engstrom, who has been at the helm for 10 years, sent the team to three NCAA tournaments and has been conference coach of the year three times. “This was a learning experience and everything we did playing against bigger teams, tougher teams, better teams … in the end it would help us. “I’m not sure exactly they believed us. We did some things and talked about the history of the program, where the alumni had been and why we recruited them … I’ll be honest, there was a week where we didn’t allow them to wear Albany gear. We said, we don’t care about the losses; it’s the fact you aren’t learning from your mistakes. The people who built this program, that’s one thing they did. Until you feel you are worthy of that, you’re not wearing the Albany stuff. After three days, they said, yeah, we think we deserve it, and we haven’t lost since.” Those four tournaments actually started off fine; losses to national powers Michigan and USC still saw the Great Danes playing with tenacity and responding to the physical challenge with superior desire. But quickly from there, the downward spiral grabbed Albany’s spirits –- the team was still trying to find a leadership core after the graduation of three powerful voices from 2016, and the perfectionist streak that ran deep through the roster became more of a drag as players struggled to understand why they weren’t playing up to their own standards. Along the way, the skills of the young lineup began to emerge, just as the coaching staff had predicted. The team leader in kills is a redshirt sophomore, Akubata Okenwa, with a freshman and sophomore taking the next two spots on the leader board. Sophomore setter Kelly Cameron leads the way there with 605 assists; freshman middle and New York native Danielle Tedesco has the best hitting percentage and also paces Albany in blocks. “We’ve still got some setter competition going on, which is fine; our middle (Tedesco) is a freshman who didn’t play high-level club. She’s a three-sport athlete, and we knew she’d eventually be pretty good,” Engstrom said. “We needed to play her. It would have been ideal to redshirt her, but she’s learning on the job. Fortunately, her emotional makeup has allowed her to handle the bumps along the way, and she’s learning a lot faster than a lot of kids in her position would. “We are teaching them to be resilient and use more positive self-talk. When something bad happens, you have the ability to change your reaction. We work on these things every day.” There’s a chance some upbeat thinking will come in handy in the AE tournament, should Albany come across New Hampshire along the way. The Wildcats have topped Albany in the past three tourney title games, and in fact handed Albany its only league loss in 2017, a five-setter on the Great Danes’ floor. On the plus side, Albany swept New Hampshire on the road in early October, and the Wildcats have four league losses, so there’s reason to be confident. Engstrom really doesn’t sweat it, as the competitive challenge of New Hampshire is something she values. “New Hampshire is extremely well-coached, and the staff is the most stable across the board in conference. Jill (Hirschinger, who has been there 21 years) has an immense knowledge of the game, and if something isn’t working, the next time you play her it will change,” Engstrom said. “We test each other, make each other better; we wouldn’t be as good without playing them and vice versa. We show each other what our weaknesses are. It’s a great rivalry, and it’s always a pretty good match. “One thing we try to keep student-athletes focused on is being in the moment. It’s not so much who we are playing against, as opposed to what their vulnerabilities are and what we can do to expose that. Whatever color shirt they wear across the net, I want them to remain in the moment.” Happy ending or not for Albany, the question lingers if Engstrom will again schedule her team to face wicked-tough competition at the start of 2018. Spoiler alert: old habits die hard. “I do know we’ll go to Michigan State, so we already have a pretty tough tournament there. For me, I’m not into wins and losses; I’m in it to teach our players the game and how to deal with adversity, stretching what they can do and make sure they understand that if they focus, they can attain those goals,” Engstrom added. “It was the first time in my career I was 0-12, but if we were to go back in time to how we are now, I think it would be a little different. Am I going to schedule a little less tough? I don’t think so.” Division-I women’s volleyball welcomes back the NIVC in 2017, a 64-team tournament bringing the postseason experience to hundreds of athletes and coaches who aren’t playing in the NCAA championships.
Research and planning is well underway; the NIVC has contacted about 100 teams to gauge interest in the event. The NIVC was held for seven seasons (1989-95) as a 20-team event, but the remodeled format fans will see in 2017 looks much like college basketball’s Postseason WNIT – which makes sense, as both of those championship moments are produced by Triple Crown Sports. All matches, including the semifinals and championship, are hosted by participating schools. Every round is single elimination. The event offers 32 automatic berths, one to each established conference, and 32 at-large berths. The NIVC field and bracket is announced late on the evening of the NCAA selections. More than 110 teams are on the NIVC’s radar and have been contacted. Two have declined the opportunity. The NIVC is committed to offering deserved opportunities to women’s volleyball programs; the event offers teams an opportunity to get more practices in, to experience playoff-atmosphere games, to play in front of passionate fans and to use their NIVC success and experience as a springboard to the next season. “Many schools have told us they would be interested in hosting NIVC games; we continue to answer questions about how the NIVC works and urge teams to get their information to us sooner rather than later,” said NIVC director Sean Hardy. “Our history with the WNIT is coming in very handy as we prepare for the revival of this event.” Selection Day is Nov. 26; Round 1 and 2 will run Nov. 28-30, Round 3 is Dec. 1-3, Round 4 is Dec. 4-6. The semifinals are Dec. 7-9, and the championship match will be held Dec. 12. With the coast-to-coast excitement brewing about the NIVC, here’s a look at the schools that have been contacted: School Conference Cincinnati AAC SMU AAC Temple AAC Tulane AAC Central Florida AAC Albany America East New Hampshire America East Stony Brook America East UMBC America East FGCU ASUN Jacksonville ASUN Kennesaw State ASUN Lipscomb ASUN Dayton Atlantic 10 VCU Atlantic 10 Duke Atlantic Coast Florida State Atlantic Coast Georgia Tech Atlantic Coast North Carolina Atlantic Coast Syracuse Atlantic Coast Kansas State Big 12 TCU Big 12 Texas Tech Big 12 West Virginia Big 12 Butler Big East Seton Hall Big East Villanova Big East Idaho Big Sky North Dakota Big Sky Northern Colorado Big Sky Portland State Big Sky Sacramento State Big Sky High Point Big South Radford Big South Iowa Big Ten Northwestern Big Ten Hawaii Big West UC Irvine Big West Col. of Charleston Colonial Hofstra Colonial James Madison Colonial Northeastern Colonial Towson Colonial Florida Atlantic Conference USA North Texas Conference USA Rice Conference USA Southern Miss Conference USA Cleveland State Horizon Green Bay Horizon IUPUI Horizon Oakland Horizon Harvard Ivy League Princeton Ivy League Yale Ivy League Fairfield Metro Atlantic Ball State Mid-American Bowling Green Mid-American Miami (OH) Mid-American Bethune-Cookman Mid-Eastern Md. Eastern Shore Mid-Eastern Drake Missouri Valley Illinois State Missouri Valley Missouri State Missouri Valley Northern Iowa Missouri Valley Boise State Mountain West San Diego State Mountain West San Jose State Mountain West Wyoming Mountain West Bryant Northeast Central Conn. State Northeast LIU-Brooklyn Northeast Robert Morris Northeast Austin Peay Ohio Valley Belmont Ohio Valley Eastern Kentucky Ohio Valley Murray State Ohio Valley SIUE Ohio Valley California Pac-12 American Patriot Army West Point Patriot Colgate Patriot Navy Patriot Alabama SEC Arkansas SEC Georgia SEC Ole Miss SEC Tennessee SEC Texas A&M SEC ETSU Southern Furman Southern Wofford Southern Central Arkansas Southland Houston Baptist Southland Stephen F. Austin Southland Alabama A&M Southwestern Alabama State Southwestern Texas Southern Southwestern Denver Summit Oral Roberts Summit South Dakota Summit Arkansas State Sun Belt Coastal Carolina Sun Belt Louisiana Sun Belt South Alabama Sun Belt Texas State Sun Belt Gonzaga West Coast Pacific West Coast Pepperdine West Coast Portland West Coast Santa Clara West Coast CSU Bakersfield Western Athletic New Mexico State Western Athletic Utah Valley Western Athletic UTRGV Western Athletic |
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