• NCAA Championship Bracket: Interactive | PDF

SAN FRANCISCO - Top-ranked and Pac-12 Champion UCLA received the No. 1 overall seed to the 2018 National Collegiate Beach Volleyball Championship, the NCAA Women’s Beach Volleyball Committee announced on Sunday. The Bruins are joined by two-time national champion USC, who is the No. 5 seed overall.

Eight teams in all receive bids to the national championship, three teams from the west region and three teams from the east region. The remaining two teams were selected at-large from the teams across the country. All eight teams are then seeded.

Joining the Bruins and Trojans in the field are No. 2-seed Pepperdine, No. 3-seed Hawai’i, No. 4-seed Florida State, No. 6-seed South Carolina, No. 7-seed LSU and No. 8-seed Florida International.

The championship will be held Friday through Sunday, May 4-6, in Gulf Shores, Ala., hosted by the city of Gulf Shores, University of Alabama at Birmingham and Orange Beach Sports Commission. The event will be televised live by ESPN networks, with ESPNU providing live coverage on Friday, May 4 starting at 10 a.m. ET. Live coverage will continue Saturday, May 5 on ESPN2, starting at 2 p.m. ET and Sunday, May 6 at 11:30 a.m. on ESPN2. The championship dual will air on ESPN Sunday, May 6, at 2 p.m. ET. Additionally, live streaming coverage of every court throughout the tournament will be available on ESPN3.

The Bruins are coming off winning their first Conference crown in the three-year history of the Pac-12 Beach Volleyball Championship. UCLA went 4-0 in the championship, which was held on the campus of Stanford University, to claim the crown. It unseated two-time champion USC, 3-1, in the championship dual. The Bruins are currently on a program-record 30-dual win streak and boast a 35-3 record. They face FIU (22-10) in the first round of the double-elimination tournament.

USC (25-12) is the only team to have won the national collegiate championship, winning the first two events in 2016 and 2017. The Trojans came in second place at the Pac-12 Championship and have been ranked in the top five in the nation all season. All 12 of their team losses have come to teams that have earned bids to the 2018 national championship. USC faces Florida State (30-6) in the first round, a rematch of a March 11 clash which the Trojans won, 3-2.