By InsideHitter Staff | April 17, 2026
Back on February 1st, as the opening month of the 2026 season wrapped up, we wrote about what was already becoming the defining theme of this year: parity. Unlike previous seasons where a clear top echelon separated itself from the field, we noted that any top 40 team could beat any other on any given day. We called it early. We just did not expect the proof to arrive all at once, in a span of a few hours, on the same Friday night in April.
Three of Division III’s most recognizable programs walked into their respective first-round tournament pods and did not walk back out. Juniata. NYU. Stevens. Three storied names. Three abrupt exits. One brutal, beautiful, absolutely chaotic evening.
Welcome to 2026. Nobody is safe.
Wittenberg Ends Juniata’s Run in Huntingdon
Juniata came into Friday ranked second in the AVCA poll at 29-2, riding a 12-match winning streak, playing at home, with a gym full of fans expecting a fairly smooth path toward Springfield. Coach Glenn DeHaven just earned AVCA Region III Coach of the Year honors. There was no reason to panic.
And then Wittenberg happened.
The Tigers are first-time D3 men’s volleyball tournament participants. First-ever MCVL champions. A program making its national debut with a 21-5 record and a chip the size of Huntingdon, Pennsylvania on its shoulder. They came in with Reese Monin, Harrison Mitchell and Michael Yurk, three of the most dangerous hitters in the Midwest this season, and they came in with something more important: a complete absence of fear.
The match went five sets. Juniata pushed back every time the Tigers threatened to pull away. But Wittenberg did not flinch. Mitchell was relentless. Carson Hill and freshman setter Gavin Hagerty ran the offense with composure that had no business existing in a first-ever tournament appearance combining for 50 assists. Libero Jake Downs held the back row together when the Eagles’ offense heated up. In the end, the Tigers closed it out to advance to Saturday’s quarterfinals.
A program in its first-ever national tournament just eliminated the second-ranked team in the country on its home floor. Write that sentence down somewhere.
New Paltz Returns the Favor, Emphatically
The NYU vs. SUNY New Paltz storyline arrived pre-loaded.
Earlier this year, NYU handed New Paltz a 3-2 loss in the UVC Championship, claiming the Violets’ first-ever conference title and bumping the defending conference champs to an at-large bid. Champagne flowed in the Violet locker room. New Paltz took notes.
Friday’s rematch was not close. Not even a little.
New Paltz dispatched NYU in three sets, hitting .411 as a team and controlling the match from the opening rotation. Set one had some drama, the Hawks needing a 28-26 finish to close it out, but once they got that first set, the Violets never recovered. Set two went 25-15. Set three went 25-18. NYU had no answers.
The offensive production across the New Paltz lineup was something to see. Nikko Tenedorio paced the attack with 10 kills, hitting .364 with three service aces mixed in. Geoff Ndoria was even more efficient, posting 9 kills at a .500 clip for 10 points. Michael Spiegel added 9 more. Mike Handell contributed 5 kills and amassed 6 blocks for a tidy 8-point evening. And then there was senior Krish Jain, who needs his own sentence: 6 kills, 0 errors, 6 total attempts, 1.000 hitting percentage. In three sets. A perfect night at the line.
For a program that had its conference title handed to NYU just weeks ago, Friday was a statement made in the clearest possible terms.
Final: SUNY New Paltz 3, NYU 0 (28-26, 25-15, 25-18).
MIT Turns Off the Lights in Hoboken
Stevens came into this tournament with momentum, a host pod at Canavan Arena in Hoboken, MAC championship hardware, and a genuine shot at a fourth consecutive Final Four appearance. Coach Dan Buehring’s program has been one of the most consistent performers in the country over the past several seasons. They were playing at home. The crowd showed up.
MIT had other ideas.
The Engineers came in fresh off a first-round sweep of St. Joseph’s (Long Island) and brought that momentum straight into Canavan Arena. Over five hard-fought sets, neither team was willing to concede the match. Stevens won the second set with authority when MIT’s offense stuttered and then won the third set 25-19 and it looked like the Ducks night.
But MIT had Nate Toth.
The junior put up 25 kills on 52 attempts, hitting .385, and was the spine of MIT’s offense from start to finish. In the fifth set, when Stevens needed stops and the Engineers needed execution, Toth delivered. MIT hit .391 in the final set and closed out the match.
The Engineers finished with 63 kills on 159 attempts, hitting .233 for the match. That number looks modest until you remember what it took to put it up: five sets on the road against a host program with Final Four expectations.
Final: MIT 3, Stevens 2 (25-21, 21-25, 19-25, 25-21, 15-12).
What We Told You
On February 1st, InsideHitter wrote that the level of D3 volleyball continues to rise, and that stars and teams working together around the country can drive their schools to success on any given day. That piece argued there was no longer a clear top echelon, that the old hierarchy had given way to something flatter and harder to predict. Nobody pushed back very hard at the time. Friday night removed any remaining doubt.
Friday night was not a fluke. It was the exclamation point.
Three programs with national pedigree went up against three opponents with something to prove. In each case, the proving happened. Wittenberg, making its first-ever national tournament appearance, eliminated the second-ranked team on its home floor. New Paltz avenged a conference title loss with the kind of clinical efficiency that leaves no room for argument. MIT dismantled a perennial Final Four program on its own court.
The bracket is wide open. Whatever assumptions anyone was carrying into this week, Friday shredded them. No program has been untouchable. No ranking has meant much when the ball goes up in the fifth set.
Wittenberg is in the quarterfinals of the D3 national championship. Let that breathe for a moment.
The 2026 tournament is not done surprising anyone.
Postscript: For a few tense minutes Friday night, it looked like Cal Lutheran might join the casualty list. Endicott pushed the Kingsmen to a fifth set and led 11-10 before Cal Lutheran steadied and closed it out 15-13. It was the one near-upset that did not fully materialize, but the fact that it got that far says everything. Four matches Friday night, three decided in five sets. The survivors know exactly how close the edge is.
Quarterfinal action continues Saturday, April 18. Follow InsideHitter.com for full coverage of the road to Springfield.
Fact Check – Stevens didn’t make it into the national quarterfinals in ’25, so lets not suggest they were going for a 4th straight Final Four berth. Also, NYU played New Paltz earlier this year and lost 3-1, never getting the chance to play them in the UVC Championship Tournament because #2 Seed MIT defeated them both along the way to earn the UVC Automatic Bid. A National Tournament invite MIT doesn’t receive had they not accomplished this last week because the NPI would have had them far removed from the conversation if they had lost the UVC Final. NYU had a great couple of years for which they earned their only Final Four in ’24, but lets not refer to NYU as “storied.” New Paltz has 5 Final Fours and two National Championships on its resume over the years, none as of late, but if we’re being honest, the Hawks were the UVC regular season champs this year, so it really isn’t much of a shocker they defeated NYU, again, is it? Anybody interested in such things would have had New Paltz as the favorite in this match.
Admittedly, MIT was a dog playing at Stevens’ home gym yesterday, but only by a small margin. Stevens had already been swept by New Paltz & NYU of the UVC earlier this year, while MIT defeated each 3-1 on their way to the UVC Championship just last week. MIT was 2nd in the UVC regular season before winning the tournament championship, too. They are one of the hardest hitting, most physical teams I have seen in D3, and I had come to write off some of their hiccups during the season as a function of limited experience as a result of their age.
Wittenberg is an interesting case study, maybe being the first Mid-West team being afforded the opportunity to play in a pod other than the Western most regional. One over the years populated not only with Carthage and Cal Lutheran National Championship teams, but last year hosted by the likes of National Runner-Up Springfield. The NACC & MCVL Champ has typically been placed head-first into a buzz saw in the earlier rounds making it almost impossible to be given their due in April. Here is Wittenberg, arguably the first to have the chance to play away from that, showing out not only for themselves, but for a conference and a region the committee and the NPI has been short-changing for at least the last few years according to all ranking systems for D3 Men’s Volleyball not produced by the NCAA.
My first take regarding yesterday’s results wasn’t that IH get credit for stating the obvious earlier this season about a leveling of the D3 MVB landscape because it isn’t the story about yesterday, even had some of the facts stated been true as written. It was that 4 of the 5 winners of the play-in games the night before took 1-set leads, either 1-0 or 2-1, before two of them held on for victory. We see it with the #11 seeded play-in games in March Madness very often, too. There is something to be said having played more recently than your opponent on their home gym the night before. Nichols from last year might agree this, too.