ABILENE – Abilene Christian Tuesday officially began its inaugural season of beach volleyball with its first practice of the spring semester. Beach volleyball is the school's 17th varsity sport and first added since women's soccer was established in 2007.
The Wildcats' beach volleyball roster is composed of 19 student-athletes, including 14 players who were part of the indoor team's historic run to the 2017 Southland Conference Championship match. ACU's roster also features beach-only recruits
Paris Cosley,
Brooke Riley and
Amy Weiss, plus recent Texas Tech and Baylor transfers,
Eighmy Dobbins and
Lexie Rawls.
"We've been anticipating this start date for quite a while," said head coach
Angela Mooney, "especially Brooke and Amy, who have been so dedicated to their training throughout the fall. They're excited to be part of history."
The Wildcats will travel to five tournaments this spring semester, starting with Arizona's Cactus Classic the weekend of Feb. 24-25, and concluding with the Southland Showcase from April 20-22. ACU is the fifth Southland Conference school to field a beach volleyball team, joining Central Arkansas, Houston Baptist, New Orleans and Texas A&M-Corpus Christi.
The schedule additionally features tournaments hosted by Grand Canyon University (March 9-10), New Mexico (March 30-31) and Texas A&M-Kingsville (April 14-15).
Arizona, which the Wildcats will face on Feb. 24, finished the 2017 season with a No. 9 ranking. Grand Canyon was ranked 12th while Arizona State and New Mexico were in the receiving votes column.
ACU only will travel 12 student-athletes to each tournament as it looks to balance the indoor and beach practice schedules.
"We have a good grip on what's needed to keep both programs competitive," said Mooney. "It's taken some strategy and organization to schedule indoor recruiting trips and training for each sport around tournaments and classes, but we plan to spend two and a half weeks focusing on beach prior to our first tournament, and then balance beach and indoor training according to both competition dates throughout the spring.
"Obviously, we want both sports to be successful," Mooney continued, "and beach brings us an additional competitive edge. There's a greater level of accountability involved that will help the indoor game."
Beach volleyball was voted into NCAA Championship sport status in 2015 after spending the previous four seasons (2011-14) as an emerging sport. The American Volleyball Coaches Association awarded national team and pair crowns from 2012-14, but the NCAA will host only a team championship based in an eight-team, double-elimination format.
Teams are split into pairs across five courts on game days and play a best-of-three series. The opposing duos play to 21 points in sets one and two, while the third-set tiebreaker goes to 15 points. And similar to indoor volleyball, a team must defeat its opposition by at least two points in each set.
Every match won will earn the team one dual point, and the first team that wins on three of the five courts will earn the victory.
USC won last year's NCAA Championship, 3-2, over Pepperdine in finishing with a 38-1 record.
