Lynchburg Athletics announced on Friday that men’s volleyball will be added as a varsity sport in the 2024-25 academic year. The search for a head coach is underway, and the team will begin practice in November 2024. The regular-season schedule begins in January 2025.
Men’s volleyball represents Lynchburg’s 26th intercollegiate offering. “We have enjoyed watching the growth of men’s volleyball among the schools in our conference and are looking forward to having this new group of student-athletes join us on campus,” said Athletic Director Jon Waters.
The Hornets will be the seventh ODAC school to sponsor men’s volleyball. Roanoke, Eastern Mennonite, and Randolph-Macon currently participate in the Continental Volleyball Conference. Averett and Virginia Wesleyan will play their inaugural season of the sport as independents in the 2023-24 academic year. Randolph announced the addition of men’s volleyball for the 2024-25 academic year as well.
The ODAC intends to sponsor the sport in 2024-25 complete with a conference championship featuring the seven aforementioned institutions. Randolph and Lynchburg would put the ODAC over the six-team threshold, which earns the conference champion an automatic bid into the NCAA tournament.
The NCAA has crowned a Division III men’s volleyball champion since 2012. The ODAC will host the NCAA 2025 DIII men’s volleyball championship in Salem, Virginia, during Lynchburg’s first year of competition. Across DIII, 103 institutions sponsor men’s volleyball, and 192 schools feature club programs.
Boy’s volleyball is the fastest growing sport in the U.S. for high school boys with 22% growth in high schools since 2018, according to the Oklahoma Boys Volleyball Association. In the last four years, nine Virginia high schools added boy’s volleyball, and a National Federation of State High School Associations survey from 2021-22 indicated 1,118 high school boys in Virginia play the sport.
Including men’s volleyball, Lynchburg has now added five sports to its intercollegiate offering since 2019. With the addition of men’s and women’s swimming, women’s golf, and women’s beach volleyball, the Hornets also elevated their equestrian offering during that five-year span. The women’s swimming team won the 2021 ODAC championship, the equestrian team won back-to-back NCEA single-discipline national championships in 2022 and 2023, and the women’s golf program has finished second in the conference championship three straight years and produced the conference’s player of the year in 2022.
Lynchburg won the 2023 Old Dominion Athletic Conference Men’s Commissioner’s Cup, and the women’s programs placed second in the standings.
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