AVCA Top 25 (9/2/25)

The AVCA has released their Top 25 for Week 1.

Not much changed between the preseason poll and this one. That means the coaches were spot on or didn’t bother to redo their rankings from scratch. My feeling is that it is a little of both.

Juniata retains the top spot with 74 first-place votes and 2106 overall Points. In fact, the Top 9 didn’t change from the preseason voting despite some of the first-place votes moving around. Whitewater received 8 first-place votes and kept the 2nd spot, Hope received 1 vote and still sits in 3rd, Johns Hopkins had 2 first-place votes and stays in 4th while Oshkosh received 1 vote and remains in 6th. Only Emory, who sits in 5th, did not received a first place vote out of the Top 6 teams.

The only team in the preseason Top 10 to move out this week was Trinity, who probably played the toughest tournament but I understand that a loss is a loss. WashU was the team to move into the Top 10. What’s really interesting is that the 2024 Elite 8 is all represented in the Top 10. Only Washington & Lee is not in the Top 8 as they sit just one spot beneath that.

You can compare and contrast the AVCA rankings with mine, which you can find here. In short, the AVCA has Millikin and Chicago in their rankings while I have Carnegie Mellon and Franklin & Marshall. We still have some drastic differences in where we see teams placed in the rankings.

The AVCA did drop two teams from their rankings in Middlebury and Case Western Reserve. CWRU went 0-4 on the weekend so that makes sense. Middlebury didn’t play and that’s always the tough thing to do in the preseason poll is to select a team that will start a week later. The biggest jump in the poll was ETBU and IWU both moving up 3 spots. Millikin fell the most dropping down 5 spots.

Teams we closely follow on this site in the rankings are La Verne (7), ETBU (11), Trinity (12), CMS (14) and Berry (24). Teams receiving votes are Whitworth, Whittier and Southwestern.

Since this is the first poll this season, I’ll remind people that two coaches from each conference are eligible to vote. The poll is normalized to ensure that 86 ballots are used even when not all of the coaches exercise their civic duty. If only 70 coaches vote, for instance, the last 16 ballots will reflect the exact order that the 70 real life voters chose.