Tournament Previews 2024 (The Rest)

This will be my last article on the tournaments where we’ll find Region X teams this year. This one will cover week 3 with four other tournaments being played during the season thrown in. I’m quite confident I missed a tournament or two. If so, sorry about that.

For week three, we have 14 teams either skipping the week or playing outside of a tournament setting. Six of these teams are from the NWC and that’s because their travel tends to be limited and with them being so remote from other DIII programs, this extra week that is happening this season is tough to fill. Overall, the teams are Caltech, Concordia, George Fox, Howard Payne, La Verne, Linfield, Occidental, Pacific, Pacific Lutheran, Redlands, Schreiner, UT-Dallas, Whitman and Willamette.

For the teams that are playing, our first tournament is the Bishop Invitational hosted by Ohio Wesleyan. Texas Lutheran is making the trip up and I like this for their team. TLU is often really good but they are losing a bunch of statistics to senior graduation this year. Still, a great chance to prove themselves and toughen up a young team. They will be facing the hosts, Albion, Heidelberg and UW-Platteville. Three of those teams would have given a Quality Win Bonus (QWB) if the NCAA Power Index (NPI) was in use in 2023. Two of the teams (Ohio Wesleyan and UW-Platteville) should have been tournament teams according to NPI.

I’m always a fan of the Region X team that heads to the New England area for matches. We seem to have someone that does it every year and this season it will be Whittier. Get a load of these teams the Poets will be facing: Calvin (a true New England power team), MIT and Tufts. Yikes! Still, this should be a fun trip and maybe, just maybe, the Poets can surprise a team or two here.

The tournament with the best name in DIII volleyball is once again occurring as California Lutheran will be hosting the Cal Lu Fornia Invitational. There will be a number of SCIAC teams here including the host, Chapman, CMS and Pomona-Pitzer. The tournament will also have East Texas Baptist, Puget Sound, UC Santa Cruz and Whitworth. This really is an outstanding Region X showdown and I’ll be interested in the CMS/ETBU matchup but every match should be fun. SoCal is really fortunate to have three really good tournaments to start the year. I’d still like to see them (the SCIAC) support the NWC tournaments a bit more since they always come south.

Lewis & Clark will head over to Macalester for their tournament week three where they will play the host, Grinnell, Minnesota-Morris and UW-Superior. These will all be tough teams for the Pios but great challenges, too. Morris will probably be the toughest opponent of the four teams. I remember a couple of years back when Lewis & Clark went east and had a great run at a tournament like this. Let’s do it again!

Mary Hardin-Baylor will be hosting a tournament this week where they will bring in Dallas, Hendrix, Hardin-Simmons, Southwestern and St Thomas. It’s good to see Southwestern and Mary Hardin-Baylor playing again as they reside 30 minutes apart and it’s just silly that these schools don’t play a home and home series every year. This is another good Region X battle (outside of Hendrix) that will provide great competitive matches.

Millsaps will host their Invitational, which will include Austin College, Centenary, LeTourneau and McMurry. In addition to Millsaps, the tournament will also have Belhaven (non-DIII) and Huntingdon. This type of tournament will really only reward the team that can sweep their matches as there is no real power team in this one.

UW-Eau Claire will be hosting the Sandy Schumacher Memorial Tournament and we see that Colorado College will be flying over to this one. Colorado College likes to host at least two tournaments each season but it’s become next to impossible for them to pull this off after the pandemic and reduced travel budgets. Instead, they will get the host, Concordia Moorhead and Marian in this one. Eau Claire will be the tough one in this tournament but neither Moorhead or Marian can be overlooked.

Our final tournament week three is the Trinity Tournament that will have Trinity, Covenant, Eastern and Endicott. That’s a really interesting group of teams. Covenant was the surprise of 2023 going 35-3 while beating Mount St Joseph in the NCAA Tournament before taking Emory to 5-sets. Eastern is always a tough team while Endicott is one of the rare New England team that likes to travel. These are really good tests for each of the four teams.

Looking outside of the first three weeks, I did find four tournaments that had Region X teams.

The weekend of September 20^th, we have the Bear Invite hosted by WashU and the NYU Tournament. La Verne is heading to the Bear Invite where they will play WashU, Cornell and UW-Whitewater. All four teams were in the NCAA Tournament last year. It’s really good to see La Verne find some travel money and play these types of quality opponents. With NPI, I’m concerned about how tough some of these schedules are and whether a top-quality team will be penalized enough to be bypassed by a lesser team. In the case of La Verne, however, this trip gets them use to the travel in addition to NCAA Tournament caliber matches.

For the NYU Tournament, it will be UC Santa Cruz heading to the wrong coast to play Johns Hopkins, MIT and NYU. That’s a tough lineup. Remember that UC Santa Cruz doesn’t get to play a conference schedule (as part of the C2C Conference) so finding matches during the typical conference season is tough. This is a great tournament for them but finding a win will be difficult.

The weekend of November 1^st finds St Thomas hosting the Avery Rae Invitational. In this one we have the host, Hardin-Simmons, LeTourneau, Mary Hardin-Baylor and UC Santa Cruz. Remember what I just said about UC Santa Cruz. The ASC is going to have a condensed conference season as they only have 5 teams left and the UT-Dallas matches won’t count as they transition to DII. That means 8 total conference matches and a lot of open weekends. This tournament helps three of those teams get some additional matches in. It will be really interesting to see how good St Thomas, Mary Hardin-Baylor and UC Santa Cruz are at this point in the year and how they come out of this tournament. These matches could position someone really well for an at-large or really hurt those chances.

The last tournament I found was one being hosted by Hendrix. At this one, we’ll have ETBU, Hendrix, LeTourneau and Rhodes. When I did my research a few weeks back, I had different teams in this one so I hope there weren’t other changes in the tournaments I’ve documented so far. Again, you see two ASC teams getting much needed matches in. ETBU should do well here.

That’s all I found although I now know changes are being made. This season is a little unusual because there is an extra week due to the early start and then there is the extra week on the back end with the championship being moved back like it was last year (the final will be held on December 7^th). This caused a number of schools to really struggle to find opponents and really stretched some travel budgets thin. I think the West did pretty well but, again, all bets are off with NPI and how teams should schedule in the future. As for me, I know I already have a conflict week three so no tournaments in my future that week. As for the four extra tournaments, I think I’d really enjoy watching La Verne at the WashU Tournament but, again, I have a conflict. This is what happens when my (hot) wife disregards my edict of no “fun” trips during volleyball season.