Wahine outside hitter Brooke Van Sickle excited to be headed close to home for NCAA Tournament first round

CINDY ELLEN RUSSELL / CRUSSELL@STARADVERTISER.COM
With technical difficulties with the ESPNU feed, the Wahine gathered and watched the NCAA selection show on their phones. Amber Igiede raised a fist when it was announced UH drew Mississippi State in the first round.

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CINDY ELLEN RUSSELL / CRUSSELL@STARADVERTISER.COM

With technical difficulties with the ESPNU feed, the Wahine gathered and watched the NCAA selection show on their phones. Amber Igiede raised a fist when it was announced UH drew Mississippi State in the first round.

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Hawaii’s postseason road trip will take Brooke Van Sickle close to home.

The Rainbow Wahine senior from Battle Ground, Wash., will be on familiar ground when UH takes on Mississippi State in the first round of the NCAA women’s volleyball tournament on Friday in Seattle.

The 64-team bracket was announced on Sunday and the Big West champion Rainbow Wahine (21-7, 18-2) will make the program’s 39th NCAA Tournament appearance against a Mississippi State team (25-5, 16-2 SEC) that will make its tournament debut in Friday’s 2:30 p.m. match.

The Wahine gathered in the Ed Wong Hospitality Room in the Stan Sheriff Center to watch Sunday’s selection show. But with technical difficulties keeping the ESPNU feed off the big screens in the room, the UH players and coaches huddled together to watch the stream on their phones.

They waited late into the show before letting out a cheer when Hawaii showed up in the bracket.

Van Sickle, who spent her first three years of college at Oregon, said Battle Ground is about 21⁄2 hours from Seattle and playing at Washington’s Alaska Airlines Arena is particularly meaningful.

“I’m really excited returning to the home state,” Van Sickle told media members after the announcement. “A bunch of my family get to come and watch me now.

“Growing up, we always had tournaments there for club and being at Oregon I played there once a year.”

Seattle has been a relatively familiar destination for the UH program as well. This week’s trip marks the fifth time UH was sent to Washington for the NCAA Tournament since 2010. The most recent came in 2017 when UH closed Robyn Ah Mow’s first year as head coach with a five-set loss to Illinois.

Washington, which clinched the Pac-12 championship on Saturday, was awarded host duties for the first- and second-rounds as the tournament’s 15th overall seed. The Huskies (24-4, 17-3 Pac-12) will face Ivy League champion Brown (20-5, 13-1) in the other first-round match. Friday’s winners meet at 5 p.m. on Saturday with the survivor advancing to next week’s regional rounds.

The Rainbow Wahine clinched the school’s 10th Big West championship and the conference’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament with a win over Cal State Northridge on Friday. UH dropped its regular-season finale against Big West runner-up UC Santa Barbara in five sets on senior night on Saturday to snap a 10-match winning streak.

After reaching the regional semifinals in Madison, Wis., in 2019, UH was shut out of the truncated 48-team NCAA Tournament that was played in the spring. The Big West canceled fall sports for the 2020-21 season and the tournament went on without Hawaii in the field for the first time since 1992.

“Everyone’s fired up,” Van Sickle said. “It sucked that the Big West got canceled last year, but definitely I feel like everyone’s more determined and excited for the tournament.”

While about half of the UH roster has yet to experience an NCAA Tournament atmosphere, Friday’s match will represent a breakthrough for the entire Mississippi State program.

The Bulldogs broke school records for overall and conference wins and Julie Darty Dennis was named SEC Coach of the Year. Mississippi State finished second in the SEC behind defending national champion Kentucky and enters the tournament with a 13-match winning streak after earning an at-large bid into the bracket.

“Looking back I feel like hopefully the nerves are calm when we play, because I know how the tournament can freak people out sometimes,” said Van Sickle, who played in two NCAA Tournaments at Oregon and with UH in 2019.

“But we made it this far, we earned our spot. … Going into the tournament I feel like we’re underdogs. We legitimately have nothing to lose. OK let’s just go out fighting and see what we can do.”

Hawaii closed the regular season at No. 57 in the NCAA RPI and is the Big West’s lone representative in the tournament. The Wahine faced five teams in the nonconference schedule that went on to earn spots in the field (Fairfield, Marquette, San Diego, Utah Valley and Utah).

Louisville is the No. 1 overall seed followed by two teams with Hawaii-born setters in Jhenna Gabriel (Maryknoll) of No. 2 Texas and Lexi Akeo (Kamehameha) of No. 3 Pittsburgh.