PROVO, Utah – BYU men’s volleyball received all but one first-place vote to move up to No. 1 in the AVCA Division I-II Coaches Poll, the association announced on Monday.
After splitting a pair of road matches at Hawai’i last week and winning five of the eight sets played, the Cougars jumped the Rainbow Warriors to claim the top spot in this week’s rankings. BYU collected 15 of the 16 first-place votes while Hawai’i picked up the last remaining vote. The Cougars head the poll with 239 points followed by the Rainbow Warriors (224 points) and UC Santa Barbara (209 points).
The last time the Cougars sat atop the rankings was in 2016, Shawn Olmstead’s first year as head coach. BYU spent six weeks at No. 1 that year and entered the NCAA Tournament as the No. 1 seed. Overall, the Cougars have now been voted the top-ranked team 76 times since their inaugural season in 1990.
BYU is 17-1 overall and 6-0 in Mountain Pacific Sports Federation play. The Cougars opened the season winning their first 17 matches before picking up their first loss of the year in a five-set thriller to Hawai’i last week. The 17-straight victories marked the program’s second-best start all-time and the second-longest winning streak in the rally era. With 13 matches against ranked opponents, BYU has played the toughest schedule in the NCAA DI-II to date with a .678 cumulative opponent winning percentage.
The Cougars will face No. 14 Stanford on Friday, March 26, at 6 p.m. PDT at Maples Pavilion in Stanford, California. The match will be streamed on the Stanford live stream hosted on Pac-12.com.
For complete rankings, visit the AVCA poll page.