BATON ROUGE, La. – The HCU beach volleyball team is set to close out the 2023 regular season this weekend with four duals at the LSU Battle on the Bayou hosted at the LSU Beach Volleyball Stadium on Friday and Saturday.
HCU (13-14) heads into the regular season's final weekend facing a pair of top-10 programs in host No. 5 LSU (21-9) and No. 10 Stanford (20-9), a North Florida (19-7) team that sits just outside the AVCA Top-20 and Southland Conference foe Nicholls (2-23).
The Huskies and Ospreys get play started on Friday, Apr. 14, morning at 10:00 a.m., meeting for just the second time in program history. HCU won that meeting, in 2017, by a 4-1 margin in Baton Rouge. UNF has won six of its last eight, all played at home, with wins over No. 17 Stetson and No. 19 Pepperdine and losses to No. 1 TCU and No. 13 FIU. The Ospreys' pairing of Madison Espy and Presley Murrah has compiled an impressive 23-3 record this season while playing a majority of their matches at the twos.
The Huskies then take on Nicholls at 4:00 p.m. on Friday, facing the Colonels for the second time this season. Nicholls has lost its last 18 duals and is led in wins, with four, by the pairs of Luciana Chuong/Katie Jones and Bethanie Durant/Alisha Wischkaemper. The Huskies and Colonels are slated to open the 2023 Southland Beach Volleyball Championship with HCU holding the No. 2 seed and Nicholls the No. 7 seed, meeting in Corpus Christi, Texas at 10:00 a.m.
On Saturday, Apr. 15, HCU takes on the 10
th-ranked Stanford Cardinal at 9:15 a.m. Stanford dropped three of four matches last weekend, falling to top-10 opponents California and UCLA as well as Arizona while defeating Oregon. A pair of freshmen, Kelly Belardi and Ashley Vincent, leads the Cardinal with a program record 20 wins this season. The Cardinal defeated the Huskies 5-0 in Fort Worth last season.
The Huskies close out the weekend and the regular season at 2:00 p.m. against the fifth-ranked Tigers. LSU owns a 9-1 record on its home court and has won six duals over ranked opponents this season. Senior Lara Boos and sophomore Ella Larkin boast a team-high 23 wins this season with just four losses while playing primarily at the No. 4 pair.
HCU will travel to Corpus Christi, Texas for the 2023 Southland Conference Beach Volleyball Championship at Waters Edge Park from Friday through Sunday, Apr. 21-23.
