127! UCLA Beach Volleyball Reclaims Position Atop the Sport, Wins National Championship with Dominant Performance over Stanford, 3-0
The Bruins took the lead on every single court and never waivered en route to the championship.
Ever since its inception, the NCAA Beach Volleyball Championship has unofficially felt like the Los Angeles Invitational. That’s because, for the vast majority of its history, the event was dominated by UCLA and Southern Cal, who combined to win the first eight championships, with four of those championships featuring an All-LA matchup. Last year felt like a changing of the guard in some respects - TCU won its first national championship, and the best UCLA could do was make the semifinals (Southern Cal was out in the quarters).
This year seemed like it would continue that trend, with the Bruins slotted in as a third seed under Stanford and Texas, and with Southern Cal fading in the quarterfinals, it would fall on UCLA to carry the torch for the LA area. The Bruins had to scrap past Cal Poly in the quarterfinals and won a back-and-forth game against Texas in the semifinals, which set them up for a 5th meeting of the season with Stanford for the championship. The two teams had split the previous four meetings, so the expectation going into today’s national championship match was that this would be a war that might come down to the final set.
That didn’t happen. Not in the slightest.
UCLA was the better team from the opening serve, winning the first set on all five courts and grabbing the first two points of the match on courts two and four in fairly dominant fashion. With the Bruins up 2-0, all eyes turned to match 1, where UCLA was locked in a second-set battle after a dominant first set. Part of that could be attributed to a knee injury that Sally Perez seemed to suffer during the first set, but the Cardinal also seemed to finally settle into the match. The two teams traded points down to the end, when a few smart plays at the net allowed the Bruins to grab the second set, and thus win their third beach volleyball championship and the 127th in school history.
I want to stress just how dominant this championship performance was. UCLA did not drop a single set on Sunday; even in the matches that were not finished, the Bruins held 19-8 and 18-15 leads (the third match in particular was not highlighted on the ESPN feed, likely because it would have removed all of the conflict from the presentation). Stanford only forced extra points in one set, where Ava Williamson and Jesse Dueck were forced to put up 25 points before winning the second set and their match. The Bruins have plenty of experience playing on Sunday in Gulf Shores compared to Stanford, and that experience seemed to carry the day; the Cardinal never seemed to get out of the blocks by comparison.
For UCLA, this was a special run to a championship. Not only did the program win its third national championship, but it was its first since 2019 after coming so tantalizingly close in 2023 and 2024, losing heartbreakers to Southern Cal. There are multiple players on this team who were also on the squad for those losses, so this was a bit of redemption for them. This was also the first national championship for Jenny Johnson Jordan as head coach, which gives her a triple-crown of championships; she won a championship as a player for UCLA in volleyball, then was an assistant coach for the national championship squads of 2018 and 2019. In addition, the Bruins had to go through former coach Stein Metzger in the semifinals, which I’m sure was a cathartic experience for the program.
After the match, Sally Perez said that she wanted to be known as the grittiest team in the country, which they proved throughout their tournament run. But as the team ran into the Gulf waters with their trophy, I think there’s another, better descriptor that this team has earned:
Champion
Congratulations to the Bruins on returning to the top of the sport!
National Champions!
Go Bruins!!!
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Not a bad start to my birthday, if I say so myself.
Congratulations, Bruins! Maybe one day they’ll move this event closer to the sport’s roots. And that not on the Gulf.