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NCAA Men's Volleyball Championship

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The NCAA Men's Volleyball Championship is the tournament that determines the national championship of American college volleyball. The competition structure of men's volleyball is dramatically different from that of most sports sponsored by the NCAA. In most sports, teams are divided into three divisions:

Division I, generally consisting of large universities that devote the most resources to athletics; these schools offer substantial numbers of athletic scholarships to attract team members (with a few voluntary exceptions, most notably the Ivy League). Division I Men's volleyball programs are allowed to offer up to 4.5 scholarships dependent on each program's athletic budget.
Division II, generally consisting of smaller institutions; these schools are also allowed to offer athletic scholarships, but in substantially smaller numbers. Division II Men's volleyball programs, similar to Division I, are also allowed to offer 4.5 scholarships.
Division III, generally consisting of smaller schools and a few large institutions that prefer to focus on academics; schools in this group are not allowed to offer athletic scholarships

Men's volleyball, however, does not have an official divisional structure—all teams, regardless of their divisional affiliation, are eligible to compete for the NCAA championship. This is different from the NCAA Women's Volleyball Championship, in which separate tournaments are conducted for all three divisions, mainly because there are far more NCAA member schools offering women's volleyball than the men's game. Although the NCAA only sponsors a single men's volleyball championship, open to all schools that sponsor the sport at varsity level (as opposed to club level), a parallel men's volleyball championship tournament is conducted that is open only to men's volleyball programs that are members of NCAA Division III. For sponsorship reasons, it is currently named the "Molten Division III Men's Invitational Volleyball Championship". Though it has never occurred, a Division III school may qualify for the at-large bid to the "NCAA National Collegiate Men's Volleyball Championship". For 2007, only Division III teams from the EIVA may earn an automatic bid as the MIVA's lower tier Coleman Division does not play into the MIVA Tournament. There are three general regions for men's volleyball: "West", "Mid-West", and "East". The three major conferences that currently represent these regions are the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation (MPSF), Midwestern Intercollegiate Volleyball Association (MIVA), and Eastern Intercollegiate Volleyball Association (EIVA). The other conferences include the North East Collegiate Volleyball Association (NEVCA), and the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC). Teams from the ECAC are members of the NEVCA. Members of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), a separate athletics governing body whose members are primarily smaller institutions, regularly play matches against NCAA teams. Because of the lack of an official divisional structure in men's volleyball, the three major conferences have member schools that normally participate in all three NCAA divisions. The MPSF men's volleyball league, otherwise made up entirely of Division I schools, has one Division II member, UC San Diego. Only four of the 11 members of the MIVA are Division I schools; the remaining seven members include four Division II schools and three Division III schools. The 13 members of EIVA include seven in Division I and three each in Divisions II and III. The sizes of the conferences have fluctuated over the years as new men's volleyball programs arise and other programs are dropped from their schools. Currently, each conference receives an automatic bid to the Final Four with one additional at-large bid. The remaining bid is an at-large bid that may be awarded to any team in Division I, II, or III. Generally, the best team in the nation (usually from one of the 3 major conferences), who did not receive the automatic bid, receives the at-large bid. The "Final Four" is a term used exclusively by NCAA Basketball but is commonly used to describe the Men's Volleyball Championship. The official name of this championship is the "National Collegiate Men's Volleyball Championship". Schools from the Pacific Coast region have dominated this sport, in particular UCLA. Al Scates, the coach at UCLA, is tied for the number of NCAA titles (19) of any coach (male or female) in any sport, with Jack Clark (19) coach of the California Berkeley Rugby team.