LONG BEACH — The Long Beach State men’s volleyball team did it the hard way in its NCAA semifinal on Thursday night.
Second-seeded Long Beach dropped the first two sets against third-seeded Grand Canyon at the Walter Pyramid, but swept the next three to advance to the national championship match for the second time in three years.
The 24-26, 26-28, 25-18, 25-23, 15-10 victory sets up a rematch with top-seeded UCLA on Saturday at 2 p.m. UCLA outlasted fourth-seeded UC Irvine in the first semifinal.
Long Beach (27-2) and defending champion UCLA (25-5) split their regular-season matches in February, each winning in four sets.
“We’ll appreciate in the moment what just happened,” LBSU coach Alan Knipe said. “It was pretty special.”
Skyler Varga had 20 kills and five of Long Beach’s 21 blocks and Sotiris Siapanis pitched in 16 kills.
“I’m really proud of my guys to beat such a good team,” Siapanis said. “You have to feed off the energy when you can’t find it internally.”
Long Beach came back from a 24-20 deficit in the first set to tie it 24-all.
Long Beach thought it had tied the score again at 25-25 on a hitting error by Grand Canyon, but the Antelopes requested a video review and it was determined the ball glanced off the LBSU block before going out of bounds, giving Grand Canyon the opening set. Long Beach hit .367 in first set, compared to .286 for the Antelopes
Long Beach and Grand Canyon (26-5) waged another tight battle in the second set. The Antelopes again reached set point first at 24-22, but Long Beach knotted it again at 24-all. Simon Torwie stuffed a kill attempt to get LBSU to set point at 25-24, but Long Beach couldn’t put the Antelopes away and they scored the final two points on a kill by Camden Gianni and a combined block.
“It was a gut check,” Knipe said. “You have a big hill to climb, but this team is pretty special when it comes to that sort of stuff.”
LBSU finally strung together some points in the…
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