April 27, 2009

2009 Championship Bracket in PDF Format

Los Angeles, CA - Almost 24 hours to the minute after winning their seventh Western Water Polo Association Championship and with it the automatic bid to the 2009 National Collegiate Women's Water Polo Championship, the LMU women's water polo team earned the No. 5 seed and will face Hawaii in the opening round of the tournament on Friday, May 8 at Eppley Recreation Center on the campus of the University of Maryland.

This will be the seventh trip in nine years for the Lions to the NCAA Championships, finishing a school-best second place in the 2004 NCAA tournament. It was the first Lion squad to play for in the NCAA Championship game. Of the seven trips, this will be just the second outside the state of California. Michigan hosted the tournament in 2005, the first year it expanded from four teams to eight.

LMU enters the tournament at 25-7 on the season after going 3-0 on the weekend to win the WWPA title. Senior Nicole Hughes scored 12 goals last weekend to earn MVP honors and run her career total to 310 and her season total to 119. The Lions will face No. 4 seed Hawaii (18-8) in Game 4 of the tournament at 6:45 p.m. The two teams played each other once this season, with Hawaii earning an 8-7 win on March 23 at LMU.

The 2009 National Collegiate Women's Water Polo Championship will be an eight-team, single-elimination tournament (12 games), with a losers' bracket to determine places three through eight.

The No. 1 seed awarded to Southern California (24-1) and the No. 2 seed was awarded to Stanford (24-3). Stanford will face No. 7 seed Marist (18-13) on May 8 in the first game of the championship at 1:30 p.m. The next game will feature No. 3 seed, UCLA (22-6) and No. 6 seed Michigan (33-8) at 3:15 p.m.

Southern California (24-1) will face No. 8 seed Cal Lutheran (19-12) in the third game of the day at 5 p.m. The final contest of the night will be LMU-Hawaii. The tournament will run May 8-10 on the Maryland, College Park campus in College Park, Mary.

The following conferences and institutions received automatic qualification: Collegiate Water Polo Association, Michigan; Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference, Marist; Mountain Pacific Sports Federation, Southern California; Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, Cal Lutheran; and Western Water Polo Association, Loyola Marymount. The following institutions received at-large bids to the championship field: Stanford, UCLA, and Hawaii.

For more information about the National Collegiate Women's Water Polo Championship and the 2009 championship bracket, log on to www.ncaa.com.