Photos courtesy League One Volleyball
A professional women’s volleyball championship will be decided in Long Beach this weekend, as League One Volleyball, known also as LOVB Pro, will bring its final two matches to the LBS Financial Credit Union Pyramid.
Teams from Austin and Salt Lake City will battle for the second ever LOVB Championship, with a two-match series beginning on Thursday night at 5 p.m. If the winner of Thursday’s match also wins the rematch on Saturday, they will be crowned champion. However, if the two teams split their meetings, they will play a “Golden Set” to 15 points to determine the winner.
The Golden Set was utilized in both semifinals–played over this past weekend in Louisville–with Austin thwarting off Atlanta and Salt Lake coming back to beat Houston by winning all four sets of their second semifinal meeting on Sunday.
Austin swept the first semifinal match, then endured a tough five-set loss to force their fate into one final race to 15. But in that decisive Golden Set, Austin leaned on a balanced attack, hitting .530 in that sixth game, while benefitting from three service errors by Atlanta.
“To me, this is what gritty feels like,” said Austin head coach Erik Sullivan of his team’s semifinal victory. “I thought we did some really wonderful things tonight but we didn’t play our best volleyball all the time. So there were moments where it would have been easy for us to cave or shrink in those moments, but I didn’t think we did that at all, and the way we showed up in the Golden Set was phenomenal.”
Austin enters this weekend’s action as the defending champions in League One Volleyball, after winning the inaugural championship a year ago. Outside hitter Logan Eggleston out of the University of Texas is one of the league’s founding athletes, and said it would be an honor to repeat as champions.
“It would mean a lot,” Eggleston said after securing her team’s spot in the finals. “Obviously this is a new league, so winning back-to-back, we’re making history doing that. And it’s really cool to create a legacy this early in a professional league … We’re not looking too far ahead yet, we want to take it one day at a time, but it would mean a lot to create that legacy and show what Austin Volleyball is.”
There is also a Long Beach State connection on the Austin bench, as former LBSU volleyball great Tayyiba Haneef-Park is the top assistant on Sullivan’s staff. Haneef-Park was an All-American on the volleyball court for the Beach from 1998-2001, is a member of the Long Beach State Athletics Hall of Fame, and is a two-time Olympic silver medalist for Team USA.
On the other side of the net will be LOVB Salt Lake, a team that scuffled going into the playoffs going just 2-9 in their last 11 matches of the regular season. However, despite losing in five sets to Houston in the semis, Salt Lake swept their way through to the finals, winning a thrilling Golden Set by a score of 19-17.
“I’m just really proud of this group,” said head coach Tama Miyashiro of her team’s journey to the LOVB Finals. “To stay in it with a lot of matches lost that didn’t go our way, I can’t express how hard that is as an athlete and a professional to stay the course. And these girls did that.”
Setter Jordyn Poulter out of the University of Illinois is another founding athlete for LOVB, and she spoke on her team’s mindset going into their do-or-die match on Sunday, knowing they needed to win four sets to advance.
“I think the expectation was, hey, we played a really solid match against them the other night. We’re gonna come out, tweak a couple things, trust what we know, and put our trust in each other, and it was really cool to see every individual rise to the occasion,” said Poulter after winning the semifinal. “I think that might have been our cleanest match of volleyball the whole season, which is awesome, and what you hope to be doing at the end.”
Both Thursday and Saturday’s matches will start at 5 p.m. PT, and will be televised live on USA Network. Tickets for both dates are now available via the Long Beach State ticket office.
