Championship Wednesday Dawns For BC and Drake

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. -- Think about the difference in two points in a volleyball match. Every point swings on the slimmest margin of error, and that edge and periphery shrinks every time the ball crosses the net. A razor thin line separates service errors from aces and digs from points, and even the best timed jump isn't guaranteed to block the most perfect run from an outside hitter. Spiked kills are tailored for highlight reels, but they are inches and millimeters away from being returned by defenders at the net.

The extreme boundaries exist because the sport is built on a blend of aggressive ferociousness and precision accuracy, and they are the reason why either Drake or Boston College will walk away from Wednesday night as the National Invitational Volleyball Championship champion after the two teams meet in a final game between a team that likely belonged in the national tournament and its upstart opponent.

"The reality is that if you can make the NCAA Tournament, you're going to have to get on a plane and go beat somebody in their building," said head coach Jason Kennedy. "This is a great opportunity for us to be able to do that with a group that's feeling pretty confident, and if we can come out on top and win a championship in December, that's a huge deal. If we don't, then this is a learning experience that we can say that we got to the point where we're playing for a championship in December, and there aren't too many people who can say that."

Drake very well could have been - and likely should have been - a tournament team, but the Bulldogs' loss to Northern Iowa in the Missouri Valley Conference postseason championship conspired with a couple of early season losses to prevent them from qualifying. They were making their first title appearance since 1996 but looked every bit of the part against the top-seeded Panthers, but a fourth set rally by UNI held off a furious set-based comeback by Drake as part of a 25-22 win to force a deciding fifth set where a two-point margin decided the conference championship.

That finish gave the automatic bid to Northern Iowa, which later defeated seventh-ranked Florida State in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, but the Bulldogs' resume should have been enough to get them into the field of 64 as an at-large bid. They won 26 matches and held a 16-2 record in a conference that annually received multiple bids in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, and their win over UNI was the only MVC loss absorbed by the Panthers during an otherwise-perfect regular season. The losses for Drake seemed isolated to a couple of bad days at the office, but the committee apparently thought the defeats against Air Force, Green Bay, North Dakota and Valparaiso were enough to give a spot to a different volleyball club.

"Drake was very good this year," said Kennedy. "They were within two points of beating Northern Iowa, and when they were down two in the fourth set, they tied it and then lost, then lost the fifth set the same way. They were basically the first team left out of the NCAA Tournament, but they were in their title game with a chance to go to the tournament. So you have to look at them as a tournament team that's very good in its own building. They're undefeated in that building, and this isn't an easy match."

Drake felt like a volleyball megalith, but that made it all the more ironic to watch the Bulldogs overcome more hurdles than most teams that advanced through the NIVC bracket. They were sent to Wichita State for their bracket and needed five sets to beat Weber State before a four-set win over Grand Canyon, and their straight sets win over Pacific came at the expense of a team that defeated nationally-ranked Brigham Young during the regular season.

The win over Davidson was equally as impressive considering the Wildcats went through North Dakota State and Wake Forest in their initial bracket, but it was still very different from BC, which breezed through Buffalo and St. John's without surrendering a set before the wins over Xavier and Southern Miss.

"They're maybe not as complex offensively as some of the other teams like Xavier or other teams that we've played already," Kennedy said. "They're straightforward in what they do because they have the pieces to do it well. When you have pieces in place, you don't have to be tricky, you just use your pieces in a way that makes them effective. So they aren't going to run a whole lot of combos, and they aren't going to change things up a whole lot [from the rest of their season]."

It's almost the perfect matchup for the tournament organizers. BC is a little bit flashier and faster, and the Eagles use two setters because they possess an insane amount of depth on a roster built largely from players who grew up in the hotbeds of California and Texas. Drake is a bit grittier and more technical with two players, one of which is MVC Player of the Year Haley Bush, who averaged four kills per set and over 500 points on the season.

One setter, Addison Beagle, is the lone player with over 1,500 assists on the season, and Kacie Rewerts posted 178 blocks while Ashlynn Kuhn and Taylor Oberpriller topped 90 blocks for a defense that registered the seventh-most send-backs in the nation.

"They have three pin hitters that can score," Kennedy said. "Bush, Rodriguez, and Oberpriller are all a threat to score, but I like to think if they have three threats to score, we have five or six. So this is going to be a game defined by who can serve the ball. We want to serve them out of their system and make it at least a little bit more challenging by not letting their middles to get involved. In their last match [against Davidson], Kuhn got overly involved and you can't let that happen. If you let that happen, as soon as you get people to defend, they'll be able to get the ball to Bush and those three good hitters and beat you."

In the end, whatever happens on Wednesday is a massive step forward for a Boston College program that never expected to find itself in a championship position. It's a major night for every Eagle that ever wore the uniform, and it's a moment already forever etched in the history of an athletics department that won the NCAA Women's Lacrosse Championship in 2021. At the time, the university was a decade removed from its last national championship, but programs like baseball, women's hockey, field hockey and both basketball programs created postseason memories by advancing to either the NCAA Tournament or an NIT-type championship. Individual competitors in Olympic sports went to the national championships in their own right, and each program found a way to shatter its own perceived glass ceiling.

Now it's volleyball's turn. This isn't the NCAA Tournament, but Louisville and Pittsburgh, two ACC programs, are matched against one another in the national semifinals this weekend. Boston College has now proven it can compete at that level, but to win a championship would represent the conference in a way that would gain a measure of revenge for all ACC schools after UNI defeated FSU in the first round. It's an opportunity to hoist a trophy and to lodge a championship in the long, storied BC awards case on campus, all in a program that's finding its groove on the national scale with arguably its best season ever.

Boston College and Drake will compete in the 2022 NIVC Championship on Wednesday, December 14, at 7 p.m. from the Knapp Center in Des Moines, Iowa. The game can be seen online via ESPN+, which is available for premium subscribers through the ESPN web platform and mobile apps.

Championship Wednesday Dawns For BC and Drake

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