AVCA Top 25 (2021 Final)

The AVCA has released their last Top 25 Poll of the season! You can find my final rankings, here. What’s funny is I think everyone forgot about this one. It was due out yesterday and it could have been posted for all I know, but the AVCA tweet notifying us didn’t come out until this morning.

No surprise that UW-Eau Claire is the #1 team in the nation after winning the national championship on Saturday. Sometimes the voters fall asleep and the top team doesn’t get all of the first place votes but that’s not the case this year. Calvin was voted the #2 team although they didn’t receive every 2nd place vote. CMS was third and Juniata was fourth so the semifinalists were all represented early. Trinity rounds out the Top 5. The first team not to make the Elite 8 in the poll was Wartburg at 6. Johns Hopkins, the previous number 1 team fell to 8th when they didn’t make the Elite 8.

Like every year, teams that were in weaker regionals but that made the Elite 8 or regional final were represented. I’m not including Tufts in this statement (they came in at 10). Teams like MIT, Susquehanna and Wesleyan all had bumps to their rankings or were added because of this reason. Mary Hardin-Baylor who did not make the NCAA Tournament, or for that matter weren’t even regionally ranked, finished 24th.

Three teams dropped out of the poll; UW-Stevens Point, Bowdoin and UC Santa Cruz.

From Region X, we had CMS (3), Trinity (5), Colorado College (14), Southwestern (18) and Mary Hardin-Baylor (24). Both Whitworth and UT-Dallas received votes but not enough to get into the Top 25.

I did notice that this will be my 1000th published post on the website. Kind of a fitting that it officially concludes the 2021 season.