CIS Nationals — Day 1 (Night)

Not sure that there's anything to really discuss about the No. 1-ranked Alberta Golden Bears win over the No. 8-ranked UNB Varsity Reds in the first round of the men's volleyball nationals here Friday night other than to say it was an absolute dissection.

The Bears, behind CIS player of the year Joel Schmuland, basically beat the V-Reds down as you'd have expected from an undefeated team playing a sub-.500 team from the weakest conference in Canada. But what was most notable — and this will come as a surprise to no one who has watched U of A this season — was how deep the Bears were and how many weapons they threw at UNB. Schmuland had 12 kills, but middle blocker Justin Merta added nine and left side Ben Saxton another eight, all impressive numbers considering U of A won the sets 12, 17 and 21. After sporting the never-in-chic dead in headlights look for the first two sets, the V-Reds rallied a bit in the third and even held a late lead before a five-point Alberta run ended things.

So we move on to the second match of the night, which was one of the more compelling ones of the day with the Brandon Bobcats somehow pulling out a five-set win over the Dalhousie Tigers in the final match of the night.

The Bobcats won't shy away from the fact that they played fairly brutally for much of the match, yet somehow are moving on to the semifinal to take on Alberta. How did they do it? Depends who you ask.

Basically, and I'm stealing Dal coach Dan Ota's words here, both teams had stretches of playing terrible and playing well.

Brandon just picked the right time to play well.

Fourth-year middle blocker Joel Small, who part-timed with the senior national program this summer, stepped up like a veteran late, helping cue a key run in which BU won four of five points in the fifth set to turn a 4-4 tie into a 9-5 advantage. Kevin Miller aced in that span as well and, in a race to 15, a four-point lead is not necessarily insurmountable, but it often feels like it to the team that is on the short end of the equation.

So the Bobcats blocked and swung hard when they needed to but weren't pretty in winning.

So the national semifinals are Brandon-Alberta and an enticing McMaster-Laval match-up between a pair of teams that a number of people around the tournament thought would be one of the victims of a first-round upset.

In the end, you could say, the pollsters got it right.

The top four move on to Day 2.

See you there.

CIS Nationals — Day 1

EDMONTON — One half of Day 1 at the CIS national men's volleyball championship is down. And so are one half of the Canada West conference teams.

The Thompson Rivers Wolfpack and the Winnipeg Wesmen — seeded sixth and seventh respectively — could not pull off first-round upsets and were subsequently bounced from the championship side of the eight-team draw on Friday at the University of Alberta.

The result is that the Canada West, far and away the top conference in Canada, is left with only two teams with hopes of a national title and both of them are due up in the coming hours.

The No. 1-ranked Alberta Golden Bears are on the floor warming for their match with the No. 8-seeded UNB Varsity Reds, a team that posted a losing record in the three-team AUS. No one expects this one to take too long.

Following that the No. 4-ranked Brandon Bobcats will face the No. 5-seeded Dalhousie Tigers in one a toss-up match. The Tigers lost a bit from last year's fourth-place finisher but still have the services of first-team all-Canadian Sander Ratsep, who will get much of BU's attention. Dan Ota, Dalhousie's coach, told me Thursday night that you don't have to look much further than a stat book to see that the Bobcats are led by first-team all-Canadian left side Paul Sanderson and second-team all-Canada West middle blocker Joel Small. So it could very well come down to which team does a better job of shutting down the other's big weapons.

So that's our situation here in Edmonton. Updates from the night games coming later.