Southland Flavor to Postseason

The NCAA women’s volleyball tournament gets underway this weekend with first- and second-round action, and there’s no shortage of Southern California representation with six area schools making the 64-team field.

Tonight in the Pacific Region, Loyola Marymount (19-10) faces Southeast Missouri State (28-5) at UC Santa Barbara at 6, and the second-seeded Gauchos (26-5) host Oral Roberts (23-12) 30 minutes after the Loyola Marymount match.

Most of the local teams play Friday night. In the Central Region, Arkansas State (28-6) will be at second-seeded Pepperdine (24-3) at 7:30 and Hofstra (26-5) will be at fourth-seeded USC (20-8), 30 minutes after the end of a match at 5.

And in the Mountain Region, Florida A&M; (23-8) will be at the Pyramid, facing second-seeded Long Beach State (27-3), 30 minutes after a 5:30 match is over.

On Saturday, third-seeded UCLA (25-3) plays host to Eastern Washington (24-7) in another Central Region match, 30 minutes after the end of a 5 p.m. match.

All second-round matches are the day after the first round.

If the top 16 seeded teams all advance to the third round (15 of 16 did last year), then UCLA and Pepperdine will face each other the following weekend in the third round at Penn State, where the Nittany Lions would play the Trojans.

UC Santa Barbara would travel to Stanford to play Nebraska in the third round, and Long Beach State would play at the toughest spot for a visiting team, Hawaii. The 49ers would face Colorado State in the third round.

Hawaii will also be the site of this year’s Final Four.

Also, in the NAIA tournament Wednesday, sixth-seeded Westmont defeated Taylor of Indiana, 15-4, 15-9, 15-13, in the first round of pool play.