Tickets on sale for May 4-8 NCAA Beach Volleyball Championship

Tickets on sale for May 4-8 NCAA Beach Volleyball Championship
Draw increases to 16 schools; LSU is currently ranked sixth

Tickets are now on sale for the 2022 NCAA Beach Volleyball Championship set for May 4 and May 6-8 at the Gulf Place Public Beach in Gulf Shores. This year’s championship will feature a new 16-team field playing in a knockout round on May 4, with the winners advancing to the eight team double elimination tourney May 6-8.
Ticket Prices: First Round (May 4): $25; General Admission All-Session (May 6-8): $55; General Admission Courtside Seating All-Session (May 6-8): $85; NCAA Fan Experience All-Session (May 6-8): $250. Purchase tickets at https://bit.ly/NCAABVB22.
All-session group tickets are also available. Single-day tickets will go on sale April 9. All duals taking place May 4-8 will be aired live on the ESPN family of networks.
LSU is ranked no. six in the AVCA current poll, despite having only two players returning from the 2021 team that finished fourth in the country. The Tigers lost to UCLA and Florida Atlantic and beat Grand Canyon, South Carolina and Georgia State during a round-robin tourney in Gulf Shores last month.
Other Southern schools ranked in the current AVCA poll’s top 16 include 2nd ranked TCU and fourth ranked Florida State. Florida Atlantic is ranked 10th and Georgia State 11th. Stetson at no. 19 and Florida Gulf Coast at no. 20 are other Southern schools that could play their way into the 16 team tourney draw behind defending champion USC and top ranked UCLA. The tourney selection criteria will include conference automatic-qualifications, and at-large teams.
After a one year COVID-19 induced hiatus, the championship returned to Gulf Shores last May, with Southern Cal powering their way past UCLA in the final. Those two California schools combined to win the first four beach volleyball championships conducted as an NCAA fully sanctioned sport. All of the tourneys were held in Gulf Shores. Florida State was the runner-up in two of the four NCAA sanctioned championships.
Gulf Shores will also host the tourney in 2023 and 2024. It then moves to Huntington Beach in California for two years. Gulf Shores will surely put in a bid to host the tourney for as long as possible beginning in 2027.
California has made girls’ beach volleyball a sanctioned high school sport, following in the footsteps of Arizona, the first state to do so.
Seven NCAA Division I conferences sponsor beach volleyball: Atlantic Sun (7 members), Big West (7 members), Coastal Collegiate Sports Assn. (12 members), Ohio Valley (6 members), Pac-12 (9 members), Southland (9 members), and West Coast (7 members). The minimum number of participating teams for a conference to qualify for an automatic bid to any NCAA championship tournaments is six.