Twenty-one games. That’s the number of games that Penn State men’s volleyball had to play on the road and neutral sites this season compared to its eight games at Rec Hall. Despite finishing with a record of 8-13 in these games, it will play in the NCAA Tournament for its third consecutive year.

Heading into the EIVA Tournament, the Nittany Lions knew they had to win three consecutive matches to clinch a spot in the NCAA Tournament. They were in unfamiliar territory. They didn’t have a home-court advantage for the first time since 2021, a first-round bye, and hadn’t won an EIVA Tournament outside of Rec Hall since 1996.

Despite all that adversity, Penn State won the EIVA Tournament for the 37th time in program history and swept all of its opponents along the way. It played its best volleyball when it mattered most and beat teams that it had lost to earlier in the regular season, like the regular-season champion, Princeton.

“I thought against Harvard, we played well, and then against [NJIT], we took another step, and I thought that was the best match we had played all year long,” head coach Mark Pavlik said. “Two nights later, against Princeton, we were playing the game the way we thought this team could play the game. The real answer somewhere lies in this team’s belief in each other and not giving up and not dwelling on the negative.”

Penn State had to overcome so much this season, unlike any other, to get to this point. It suffered its first losing record under Pavlik, lost four starters from last year’s team, and took more than seven games for it to get its first win of the season, which last happened in 1999. Even though it ended with a losing record, unlike the 1999 team, it managed to complete phase one of their season turnaround just like them: winning the EIVA Championship.

“It all begins and ends with the EIVA playoffs, so you got to get in and be ready to win three matches,” Pavlik said. “That’s what [the team] never lost sight of. This group just kept its eyes on [being ready] to go through the EIVA and [making] sure that we’re at our best. I tip my hat to them [because] they did that very well this year.”

Now, the Nittany Lions will have a chance to make a run in the NCAA Tournament, something the 1999 team did when they made the semifinals of the tournament. This will all begin on Friday when they take on Daemen in the first round of the NCAA Tournament at Daemen’s campus. These teams have only played each other once in their history when the Nittany Lions swept the Wildcats at Rec Hall in 2023.

Daemen had a similar regular season and journey to making the NCAA Tournament to it. It earned the No. 3 seed in its conference tournament and ran the table on the road by beating the No. 2 seed Long Island and No. 1 seed Saint Francis to win the Northeast Conference championship.

In its second year since the tournament was expanded to nine teams, Penn State will have to play a play-in match for the first time to make the quarterfinals and be officially seeded as the No. 7 seed. It will have to do it on the road once again. However, after all the challenges the team went through this season, especially being on the road most of the time, Pavlik has no doubt that his team can make a run in the NCAA Tournament.

“These guys are road warriors,” Pavlik said. “If there was a team that was built for winning stuff on the road, it was this team because we’ve been on the road forever. Two home matches before spring break and two home matches before the last weekend of March. Now it’s up to me to make sure that their bodies are in the best situation they can be in at this time of the year.”