Illini volleyball to host
The No. 5 Illinois volleyball team will open the NCAA tournament at home Thursday against Indiana-Purdue-Fort Wayne. The 7 p.m. match at Huff Hall will follow another first-round matchup at 4:30 p.m. between Dayton and Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Kevin Hambly's Illini (24-5) were seeded fifth in the 64-team field. They are in the same regional pod as fourth-seeded Stanford, 12th-seeded Hawaii and 13th-seeded Michigan. IPFW enters with a 20-11 record.
Thursday's first-round survivors at Huff will meet at 7 p.m. Friday, with the winner advancing to the Stanford Regional Dec. 11-12.
The WVB tournament doesn't have (or need) pods because it awards 16 four-team sub-regionals to 16 sites with one seeded team per site (only the top 16 teams in the WVB tournament are nationally seeded). Pod-based tournaments have only 8 sites with 2 pods per site.
This season, 11 of the seeded teams... including Illinois... are hosting sub-regional tournaments. The other five seeded teams... Washington, California, Hawai'i, Oregon and Minnesota... are playing at sub-regionals hosted by unseeded teams (Colorado State, Ohio State, USC, Kentucky and Tennessee).
Since the NCAA wants most sub-regionals to be on Friday and Saturday and tries to minimize travel costs (which are borne, along with lodging, by them), most seeds that do not host a sub-regional are either geographically isolated (e.g., Hawai'i), have conflicts with basketball at their home arena on Saturday (e.g., Cal) or both (e.g., Washington) or were unable to host for some other reason.
As an Illinois alum who has been rooting for Stanford for thirteen years but has tried to keep up with Illinois VB (e.g., I attended the 1998 Long Beach regional to watch both Illinois and Stanford), a Stanford-Illinois regional final would be a really ambivalent experience for me... I wish Illinois the best, but I think the Cardinal at the top of their game would be too much for Illinois at the top of their game.
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