Shortly after it was released Sunday morning, we posted the full bracket for the CIF Division 1-AA girls’ volleyball postseason—you can click here to see the full bracket.  The tournament features four Moore League schools, including three CIF top-tens—Wilson, who goes in as the four seed of the whole bracket, Lakewood, as the tournament’s five-seed, Poly as the tournament’s ten-seed, and Millikan, who qualify as the Moore League’s fourth-place team.  St. Anthony’s also qualified in Division 4.

Previews of the individual games will run on the days the games are played (the first round starts Tuesday at 7pm) and results will be posted as soon as games end; but before we get into specifics, we wanted to pull back and take a quick, general look at the brackets, and how they break down for our local teams.

For Wilson, things are rosy.  For one thing, only two teams get first-round byes, one-seed Newport Harbor and four-seed Wilson.  “I thought that was pretty amazing myself,” said Wilson coach Susan Pescar.  “I guess they had to keep those byes on one side of the draw.  It gives us a couple extra days to prepare, which is great.” 

Wilson will watch (literally) to see if Edison can win at Newbury Park, because they’ll host the winner in round two on Thursday.  With one win, they’d advance to the quarters, and with another to the semis, where they would almost certainly face the bracket’s top seed, Newport Harbor.  “But there’s so many teams that can take anybody out.  If you watched the top four, or top ten teams in CIF this year, it was all over the place because everybody was close.  It’s not going to be easy for any top four seed to get where they’re supposed to go—it should be interesting, there could be upsets all along.”  She added, laughing, “But we don’t want to be upset, though.”

If they’re not, they’ll likely face Santa Margarita or Redondo in the quarters, before the showdown with Newport Harbor in the semis.

For the league’s second place team Lakewood, the road starts a round earlier.  The Lancers will host Thousand Oaks, the three-seed from the Marmonte League, on Tuesday.  With a win, they’d face San Clemente most likely in the second round; that’s where it gets really rough in a nasty bottom half of the bracket.  Should Lakewood advance to the quarters, they would probably face Mira Costa, then Los Al in the semis, two very tough wins to get into the championship.

For Poly, it’s even harder, as the Jackrabbits are the only CIF top ten who doesn’t start with a home match (a result of being third place in the Moore League).  Poly will start at Capistrano Valley, not a gimme by any stretch of the imagination, then if they win they’d probably host Harvard-Westlake.  It gets worse—if they advance to the quarters, they’d have top seed Newport Harbor.  A very rough road for a top ten team, but the bracket at a certain point is seeded by placement in league, and not just CIF rankings.

Millikan really has their hands full early, traveling to face Murrieta Valley in round one; Murrieta is the eight-seed in the bracket (in other words, two seeds better than a Poly team that beat Millikan twice this year).  A win there would see the Rams hosting Mater Dei, and if they got past the Monarchs, they’d face Los Al—pretty tough.

St. Anthony, in the Division Four bracket, will host Villanova Prep in the historic Saints gym, on Tuesday at 7pm.  We’ll get results from that, as with all the other matches, and let you know Tuesday night how everyone did.