Creighton, Marquette Dance Again In NCAA Tournament
NEW YORK – Selection Sunday resulted with the BIG EAST once again having two volleyball teams heading into the month of December still playing. Along with BIG EAST Regular Season and Tournament Champion Creighton, tournament runner up Marquette heard their names announced during the ESPNU NCAA Selection Show broadcast on Sunday night.
Creighton (25-6, 16-2 BIG EAST) was named the overall No. 9 seed and will host the first and second rounds of the tournament at D.J. Sokol Arena. The Bluejays will host Coastal Carolina at 8 p.m. ET on Dec. 1 in the first round. On the other side of the bracket, Missouri State and Michigan State will also be in Omaha playing in the 5 p.m. match.
Creighton is making its seventh NCAA Tournament appearance, all in the last eight years. With its sixth straight bid, the Bluejays are the school's first women's squad in any sport to reach five consecutive NCAA Tournaments. It is the second time the Bluejays have been seeded. In 2015, Creighton was seeded No. 16. Creighton is 8-6 all-time in the NCAA's, including a 3-1 record last year when the team won the Lawrence sub-Regional and advanced to the program's first Elite Eight after defeating Michigan in the Regional Semifinal in Austin, Texas.
Marquette (22-9, 15-3 BIG EAST) will travel to Ames, Iowa to face in-state rival Wisconsin at 5 p.m. ET in first round action on Dec. 1. Marquette and Wisconsin faced off earlier this season in Madison. Wisconsin won, 3-1. The winner will take on the winner of No. 14 Iowa State and Princeton, which will take place at 8 p.m. on Friday.
It is Marquette’s seventh consecutive NCAA berth.
First- and second-round matches will be played November 30 through December 2 at 16 campus sites. Teams winning both matches will move on to regional play December 8 and 9. Regionals for the NCAA Division I Women's Volleyball Championship will be held at four non-predetermined campus sites, which will be announced after play concludes, on December 2. At each site, four teams will compete in single-elimination regional semifinal competition.
The top 16 teams were seeded nationally and placed within four regions. Penn State earned the top seed followed by No. 2 Florida. Defending national champion Stanford earned the third seed while Kentucky rounded out the top four.
Per the established bracketing principles, the top 16 seeds were provided the opportunity to host. Additionally, team pairings were determined by geographic proximity, with the exception that teams from the same conference were not paired during the first- and second-rounds.
The regional winners will advance to the national semifinals and championship final co-hosted by the University of Missouri Kansas City, University of Kansas and Kansas City Sports Commission on December 14 and 16 at the Sprint Center in Kansas City, Missouri. The national semifinal matches will broadcast on ESPN/ESPN2 and the championship match will broadcast on ESPN2
All regional and championship site match times can be found on the attached championship bracket or online at www.ncaa.com/wvb.