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There will be a whole new look this year to the committee that determines the men’s volleyball NCAA Tournament field.
The NCAA men’s volleyball committee along with expanding from three to five members will have four first-year committee members this year, including two head coaches.
Stanford coach John Kosty and King coach Ryan Booher both were selected to the committee for four-year terms.
Kosty is in his 14th season as the Cardinal head coach and has guided Stanford to top-10 finishes in the national rankings 10 times in the last 12 seasons. He also guided Stanford to the 2010 NCAA championship en route to being named the National Coach of the Year and then coached the Cardinal to the 2014 NCAA Tournament finals.
Booher was recently selected as the ConfCarolinas Coach of the Decade and is the longest tenured active coach in the conference. The Tornado under Booher have won three consecutive ConfCarolinas regular season championships and in 2018 guided the program to its first NCAA Tournament appearance.
Both Kosty and Booher are the first coaches in recent history to be named to the NCAA men’s volleyball committee, which is typically comprised of athletic administrators. Kosty will serve as a West Coast representative, while Booher will be the committee’s Southeast representative.
Along with win Kosty, Hawai’i athletics director David Matlin will serve as the other West Coast representative on the committee.
Matlin replaces Ashley Armstrong who departed the committee after leaving the UCLA athletics department to become the deputy athletics director at Loyola Marymount. In five years of Matlin overseeing the Rainbow Warriors athletics department, the men’s volleyball team has reached the NCAA Tournament three times and annually has one of the nation’s top two home attendance averages.
NJIT athletics director Lenny Kaplan will remain the chair of the committee for the second consecutive year.
Kaplan in a recent interview with Off the Block said there remains one vacancy on the committee. He also said he hopes to have the position filled before the committee begins to regularly meet during the second half of the season.
The retirement of Purdue Fort Wayne senior associate athletic director Tim Heffron resulted in the opening on the committee and the need for a new Midwest representative.
Kaplan said he has reached out to the MIVA and requested that it nominates an administrator from one of the conference’s schools to serve on the committee.
The NCAA men’s volleyball committee will unveil the seven-team field for the 2020 NCAA Tournament on Sunday, April 26. The tournament field will include five conference champions and two at-large bids.