Tulane Beach Volleyball Ranked Top 20
With the collegiate beach volleyball season opener mere days away, the Tulane Green Wave will enter the campaign with a jolt after securing top-20 rankings in both of the beach volleyball polls. The AVCA Coaches Poll tabbed the Wave as No. 20 in the country, and the TruVolley poll notched Tulane at 18th.
UCLA enters the season as the No. 1 team in both polls. The Bruins tallied 12 first-place votes in the AVCA rankings. Stanford, Cal Poly, USC, and TCU round out the AVCA preseason top five. The TruVolley top five is almost identical with the only difference being TCU and USC swapping spots.
The Tulane roster is led by six senior players, three true seniors and three graduate students. The graduates are Amirah Ali, Emma Morris, and Giorgia Walther. The three Wave true seniors are Molly Trodd, McKenzie Cutler, and Sam O’Connor. Morris and Trodd marked half of the Tulane quartet that competed in the AVCA Pairs National Championship during the fall slate. The other two were Skylar Ensign and Katie Hansen.
The Green Wave will begin the 2026 campaign at home this weekend, hosting the Green Wave Invitational at White Sands Volleyball Courts. Tulane is set for five matches over the weekend with the first coming against No. 12 LSU on Friday, February 20, at 8:30 a.m.
Portions Courtesy Tulane Athletics
Doug has covered a gamut of sporting events in his fifty-plus years in the field. He started doing sideline reporting for Louisiana Tech football games for the student radio station. Doug was Sports Director for KNOE-AM/FM in Monroe in the mid-80s, winning numerous awards from the Louisiana Sports Writers Association for Best Sportscast and Best Play-by-Play. High school play-by-play for teams in Monroe, Natchitoches, New Orleans, and Thibodaux, LA dot his resume. He did college play-by-play for Northwestern State University in Natchitoches for nine years. Then, moving to the Crescent City, Doug did television PBP of Tulane games and even filled in for legendary Tulane broadcaster, Ken Berthelot in the only game Kenny ever missed while doing the Green Wave games. His father was an alumnus of Tulane in the 1940s, so Doug has attended Tulane football games in old Tulane Stadium, the Superdome, and Yulman. He was one of the 86,000 plus on December 1, 1973, sitting in the North End Zone to seeTulane shutout the LSU Tigers, 14-0. He was there when the Posse ruled Fogelman and in Turchin when the Wave made it to the World Series. He currently is the public address voice of the Tulane baseball team.