Belmont Abbey and Erskine were the winners as the Conference Carolinas tournament got underway and heads into Tuesday’s quarterfinals.
Eighth-ranked Pepperdine swept visiting No. 12 Stanford in the MPSF on Thursday.
Friday, as teams jockey for tournament seeding, there are key matches in the MPSF, Big West and EIVA. The MIVA begins its tournament Saturday.
The MPSF heads into its final regular-season weekend with top-ranked UCLA, which has already won the top-spot in next week’s conference tournament, at BYU. Fifth-ranked USC goes to No. 9 Grand Canyon and No. 6 UC Santa Barbara is at Concordia Irvine.
There are two Big West matches Friday when No. 3 Long Beach State is home for CSUN and No. 4 Hawai’i goes to No. 14 UC Irvine.
In the EIVA, No. 2 Penn State is at Charleston, St. Francis Brooklyn goes to NJIT, Sacred Heart is at Princeton, and Harvard is at George Mason.
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CONFERENCE CAROLINAS — The league gets one of the five automatic NCAA bids. Erskine will play Emmanuel on Tuesday, while Belmont Abbey gets Mount Olive. North Greenville and King await the winners in the semifinals.
Sixth-seeded Belmont Abbey (15-15) beat seventh-seeded Lees-McRae (8-15) 25-13, 25-12, 23-25, 25-15 as Matteo Miselli had 22 kills, hit .486, and had an assist, three aces, six blocks and three digs. Belmont Abbey had a school-record 20 blocks, 14 by Kyle Ferguson. Two of his were solos and he had nine kills with one error in 16 attacks to go with an assist, an ace and two digs. Belmont Abbey his .360 and had eight aces and 15 errors. Michael Marsans led Lees-McRae with 10 kills. L-M hit .059 and had two aces and 17 errors …
Fifth-seeded Erskine (13-17) put an end to a miserable season for Barton (0-20) 25-18, 25-14, 25-19. Austin Edgerrin led with 16 kills as he hit .310 and had a block and seven digs. Jason Hall had 11 kills, hit .389, and had an assist, four aces, two blocks and three digs. Kacper Rybarczyk had 10 kills with one error in 18 attacks, two assists, an ace, a block and seven digs. Erskine hit .427 and had six aces and eight errors. Barton hit .195 and had two aces and 12 errors.
PEPPERDINE TOPS STANFORD — Pepperdine (15-9, 6-5) won its MPSF match over visiting Stanford (12-12, 4-7) 25-18, 25-19, 25-19, as the Waves hit .419 and had seven aces and 12 errors. Bryce Dvorak had four of those aces to go with a kill, 34 assists, three digs and two blocks, one solo. Alex Gettinger had 15 kills, hit .500, and had an assist, a block and seven digs. Stanford, which hit .259 and had two aces and 16 errors, got nine kills from Will Rottman.