Amber Igiede grew up attending youth volleyball camps on the LSU campus, about 20 minutes from her home.
Some four years after branching out from Baton Rouge, La., to pursue her college career in Hawaii, the Rainbow Wahine middle blocker will face her hometown team in an NCAA women’s volleyball tournament match in Northern California.
The Big West champion Rainbow Wahine (22-6) drew the eighth seed in the 16-team Stanford Quarter of the NCAA Tournament bracket and will face LSU (15-13) at 2:30 p.m. on Friday at Maples Pavilion in Stanford, Calif.
“I don’t know if I just spoke it into existence, but I literally said, ‘we’re going to play LSU,’ and it came up and everyone was like ‘how did you know what?’” Igiede said after the team watched Sunday’s tournament selection show in the Edwin Wong Hospitality Suite in the Stan Sheriff Center. “I don’t know, it just popped up so that’s crazy.”
The Wahine returned to campus from their final road trip of the regular season earlier on Sunday and will head back to California later this week for the subregional hosted by Pac-12 champion Stanford (24-4).
The Cardinal, the No. 4 national seed, will take on Pepperdine (19-10) of the West Coast Conference in the other match in the subregional. Friday’s winners meet in the second round on Saturday at 4 p.m.
Igiede will make her third appearance in the NCAA Tournament after helping power the Wahine to the program’s 29th straight berth (not counting the 2020 season when the Big West canceled fall sports) and 40th overall. She closed the regular season as the Big West leader in points per set (4.90) and hitting percentage (.439). She tied for second in the conference with 3.79 kills per set and was solo second with 1.30 blocks per set.
The Rainbow Wahine enters the NCAA Tournament riding a 12-match winning streak and clinched the Big West championship and the conference’s automatic NCAA bid with a five-set win at second-place UC Santa Barbara on Friday. They capped the regular season with a four-set win at Cal State Northridge on Saturday to finish the league schedule at 19-1, posting the program’s best conference winning percentage (.950) since going 16-0 in 2015.
UH was the lone Big West team in the 64-team bracket and faced three other tournament teams — San Diego, Pittsburgh and Southern Cal — during its early-season schedule.
After Saturday’s win at CSUN, UH coach Robyn Ah Mow said she assembled the challenging nonconference schedule “for this reason. Getting us ready for the Big West and knowing that those were some of the top teams.
“Being able to play against those teams, the experience going into the tournament … this is why we do it.”
UH dropped matches to San Diego and Pittsburgh in the season-opening Texas A&M Invitational in late August and split a series with USC at SimpliFi Arena at Stan Sheriff Center, winning the second match in a reverse sweep.
San Diego is the No. 2 seed in the Stanford region and Pittsburgh is No. 2 in the Wisconsin region. USC is No. 6 in the Texas region.
“That’s awesome for us to have that under our belt,” UH outside hitter Riley Wagoner said, “and just be able to go back and look at the film from those games and see how we were playing then and what we’ve changed from then to now and what we need to keep improving on.”
Wagoner and Igiede were freshmen on the 2019 team that hosted the first and second rounds before falling to Nebraska in Madison, Wis. The Wahine will face an SEC team in the first round for the second straight season after knocking off Mississippi State in five sets last year in Seattle.
Among those making their NCAA Tournament debuts this week will be freshman outside hitter Caylen Alexander.
“It’ll just be big for us to have a lot of starters that have already been to the tournament a couple times so hopefully that calming presence will give her an easier road into it,” Wagoner said. “I think she’s a super strong kid so she’s not going to get too frazzled by the tournament.”
UH enters Friday’s match at 3-0 in the all-time series with LSU, the last meeting coming in 2003. The Tigers, led by first-year coach Tonya Johnson, were awarded an at-large berth after going 9-9 Southeastern Conference play and finishing seventh in the league standings.
Senior Sanaa Dotson, a 6-foot outside hitter, leads the Tigers with 3.67 kills per set, good for seventh in the SEC. Libero Ella Larkin topped the conference with 4.41 digs per set.
The other match of the subregional will also have strong Hawaii ties in Pepperdine head coach Scott Wong, a Punahou graduate, and Stanford libero Elena Oglivie, a former All-State Player of the Year at ‘Iolani.
NCAA WOMEN’S VOLLEYBALL TOURNAMENT
At Maples Pavilion; Stanford, Calif.
Friday
>> Hawaii (22-6) vs. LSU (15-13), 2:30 p.m.
>> Pepperdine (19-10) vs. Stanford (24-4), 5 p.m.
Saturday
>> First-round winners, 4 p.m.
>> Radio: UH-LSU match on 1420-AM / 92.7-FM
>> TV/video: TBD
