The National Collegiate Men’s Volleyball Championship semifinals are set: - Articles

On Thursday night at 6 p.m. Eastern, top-seed and top-ranked BYU takes on Long Beach State, followed by second-seeded UCLA facing Ohio State. Both matches will be streamed by host Penn State and shown on NCAA.com. In the first play-in match Tuesday night in State College, Pa., fourth-ranked and fourth-seeded Long Beach State (25-7) swept No. 5 seed Erskine, 25-14, 27-25, 25-20. Long Beach is back in the semis for the first time since 2008. Erskine, the Conference Carolinas winner, ended its season 20-7. And in the nightcap, Ohio State (29-3) won for the 21st consecutive time by beating upstart George Mason 22-25, 25-21, 25-20, 25-21. The Patriots, who won the EIVA, saw their season end at 18-9. "We needed to win this match and I thought our guys did some really good things tonight," Long Beach coach Alan Knipe said. "Our guys also showed a lot of maturity in how they handled getting ready for the match. "A lot of credit goes to Erskine. We got a lopsided win in the first set and they came back and showed their character and pride. I thought it was good to get that close-set feeling because that can always help in a tournament like this. Overall, offensively we hit a pretty big number which made it a little bit easier for us. We could have probably done a better job with our floor defense which is something we pride ourselves on and we'd like to be better serving than we were tonight when we play on Thursday."...

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