{"id":184848,"date":"2026-02-19T17:28:21","date_gmt":"2026-02-19T17:28:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/184848\/"},"modified":"2026-02-19T17:28:21","modified_gmt":"2026-02-19T17:28:21","slug":"beach-volleyball-begins-season-with-two-matches-at-pepperdine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/184848\/","title":{"rendered":"Beach Volleyball Begins Season With Two Matches At Pepperdine"},"content":{"rendered":"

LONG BEACH, Calif. \u2013 No. 10 Long Beach State Beach Volleyball will start the 2026 season with two matches on Saturday, taking on No. 19 Washington and Pepperdine as the Waves host both matches from the Pepperdine campus in Malibu. \u00a0
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\nLong Beach State’s Malia Gementera<\/a> and Taylor Hagenah<\/a>, recently selected for the 2026 AVCA National Player of the Year Watch List, will lead the Beach as the pair looks to come even closer to 100 career wins. Already the program’s wins leaders with 95, the reigning Big West Players of the Year and two-time All-Americans are looking to push themselves and the Beach to even bigger heights this season.
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\nLearn more about the pair in BEACH READS: Making an Impact<\/a>
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\nUnder the leadership of 3-time Big West Coach of the Year Mike Campbell<\/a>, Long Beach State again begins the season ranked in the Top 10 nationally, and will support the star seniors with a collection of new and old players.
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\n2025 Big West Freshman of the Year Demi Wagdy<\/a> returns as do lineup regulars Savannah Standage<\/a>, Tineke Hinton<\/a> and Mahala Esser<\/a>. Kiara Edwards<\/a> comes to the team as a Division I transfer from San Jose State, and the Beach returns three other key 2025 letterwinners in Kealoha Phillips<\/a>, Brooke Birch<\/a> and Victoria Henkel<\/a>.
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\nLong Beach State was picked to finish second in the Big West, receiving two first-place votes in the preseason Big West Coaches Poll, trailing No. 3 Cal Poly while finishing ahead of No. 16 Hawai’i, UC Davis, CSUN, Cal State Bakersfield and Sacramento State.
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\nThe first match is scheduled to begin at Noon against the Huskies followed by playing the hosts, Pepperdine, at 2 p.m.
\n\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONG BEACH, Calif. \u2013 No. 10 Long Beach State Beach Volleyball will start the 2026 season with two…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":184849,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[131,133,132],"class_list":{"0":"post-184848","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-long-beach","8":"tag-long-beach","9":"tag-long-beach-headlines","10":"tag-long-beach-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184848\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}