{"id":269785,"date":"2026-04-15T23:09:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T23:09:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/269785\/"},"modified":"2026-04-15T23:09:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T23:09:09","slug":"league-one-volleyball-brings-championship-series-to-long-beach-this-weekend-the562-org","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/269785\/","title":{"rendered":"League One Volleyball Brings Championship Series to Long Beach This Weekend \u2013 The562.org"},"content":{"rendered":"

Photos courtesy League One Volleyball<\/p>\n

A professional women\u2019s volleyball championship will be decided in Long Beach this weekend, as League One Volleyball, known also as LOVB Pro, will bring its final two matches to the LBS Financial Credit Union Pyramid.<\/p>\n

Teams from Austin and Salt Lake City will battle for the second ever LOVB Championship, with a two-match series beginning on Thursday night at 5 p.m. If the winner of Thursday\u2019s match also wins the rematch on Saturday, they will be crowned champion. However, if the two teams split their meetings, they will play a \u201cGolden Set\u201d to 15 points to determine the winner.<\/p>\n

The Golden Set was utilized in both semifinals\u2013played over this past weekend in Louisville\u2013with Austin thwarting off Atlanta and Salt Lake coming back to beat Houston by winning all four sets of their second semifinal meeting on Sunday.<\/p>\n

Austin swept the first semifinal match, then endured a tough five-set loss to force their fate into one final race to 15. But in that decisive Golden Set, Austin leaned on a balanced attack, hitting .530 in that sixth game, while benefitting from three service errors by Atlanta.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me, this is what gritty feels like,\u201d said Austin head coach Erik Sullivan of his team\u2019s semifinal victory. \u201cI thought we did some really wonderful things tonight but we didn\u2019t play our best volleyball all the time. So there were moments where it would have been easy for us to cave or shrink in those moments, but I didn\u2019t think we did that at all, and the way we showed up in the Golden Set was phenomenal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Austin enters this weekend\u2019s action as the defending champions in League One Volleyball, after winning the inaugural championship a year ago. Outside hitter Logan Eggleston out of the University of Texas is one of the league\u2019s founding athletes, and said it would be an honor to repeat as champions.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would mean a lot,\u201d Eggleston said after securing her team\u2019s spot in the finals. \u201cObviously this is a new league, so winning back-to-back, we\u2019re making history doing that. And it\u2019s really cool to create a legacy this early in a professional league \u2026 We\u2019re not looking too far ahead yet, we want to take it one day at a time, but it would mean a lot to create that legacy and show what Austin Volleyball is.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is also a Long Beach State connection on the Austin bench, as former LBSU volleyball great Tayyiba Haneef-Park is the top assistant on Sullivan\u2019s staff. Haneef-Park was an All-American on the volleyball court for the Beach from 1998-2001, is a member of the Long Beach State Athletics Hall of Fame, and is a two-time Olympic silver medalist for Team USA.<\/p>\n

On the other side of the net will be LOVB Salt Lake, a team that scuffled going into the playoffs going just 2-9 in their last 11 matches of the regular season. However, despite losing in five sets to Houston in the semis, Salt Lake swept their way through to the finals, winning a thrilling Golden Set by a score of 19-17.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m just really proud of this group,\u201d said head coach Tama Miyashiro of her team\u2019s journey to the LOVB Finals. \u201cTo stay in it with a lot of matches lost that didn\u2019t go our way, I can\u2019t express how hard that is as an athlete and a professional to stay the course. And these girls did that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Setter Jordyn Poulter out of the University of Illinois is another founding athlete for LOVB, and she spoke on her team\u2019s mindset going into their do-or-die match on Sunday, knowing they needed to win four sets to advance.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the expectation was, hey, we played a really solid match against them the other night. We\u2019re gonna come out, tweak a couple things, trust what we know, and put our trust in each other, and it was really cool to see every individual rise to the occasion,\u201d said Poulter after winning the semifinal. \u201cI think that might have been our cleanest match of volleyball the whole season, which is awesome, and what you hope to be doing at the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both Thursday and Saturday\u2019s matches will start at 5 p.m. PT, and will be televised live on USA Network. Tickets for both dates are now available via the Long Beach State ticket office.<\/a><\/p>\n

\"260412<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photos courtesy League One Volleyball A professional women\u2019s volleyball championship will be decided in Long Beach this weekend,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":269786,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[131,133,132],"class_list":["post-269785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-long-beach","tag-long-beach","tag-long-beach-headlines","tag-long-beach-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269785","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=269785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}