Field Hockey

North Carolina, Louisville Earn NCAA Field Hockey Championship Berths

GREENSBORO, N.C. (theACC.com) – Two-time defending national champion North Carolina will return to the NCAA Division I Field Hockey Championship as the No. 1 seed, and Louisville earned the No. 3 seed as pairings and brackets for this year’s tournament were unveiled Saturday night.

Despite a reduced 12-team bracket for this year’s event in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ACC placed multiple teams in the NCAA tournament field for the 26th consecutive season.

North Carolina (16-1) brings a 15-match winning streak into the NCAAs, including Friday’s 3-2 win over Wake Forest in the ACC’s Automatic Qualifier Game. The ACC champion Tar Heels will  be part of the NCAA field for the 18th consecutive year and a nation-leading 37th time overall during Karen Shelton's 40-year watch as head coach.

Louisville (13-5), which finished atop the ACC regular-season fall standings, will take part in NCAA postseason play for the sixth time in seven years and ninth time overall. The Cardinals earned one of three at-large selections extended by the NCAA Field Hockey Committee.
 
Both the Tar Heels and Cardinals will receive first-round byes into the quarterfinals as the tournament begins this Friday (April 30) in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and University Park, Pennsylvania.

UNC is set to open play at home on Sunday (May 2) at noon versus the winner of Friday’s first-round game between Miami, Ohio (13-1) and Stanford (10-2). Louisville’s quarterfinal matchup also comes Sunday at 3 p.m. on the campus of Penn State, where head coach Justine Sowry’s Cardinals will face the winner of the opening round game between UConn (11-1) and Rider (6-1).

Please see http://theacc.co/NCAAfhBracket for the complete bracket to this year’s NCAA Division I Field Hockey Championship.

North Carolina will host the semifinals and final Friday, May 7, and Sunday, May 9, at Karen Shelton Stadium. The semifinals will be available on ESPN3 and the championship game will be broadcast on ESPNU.

The ACC currently owns a streak of 31 straight years with at least one team in the NCAA semifinals. Forty-one of the last 68 teams to reach the national semifinals have come from the ACC, including three of the four in 2019. ACC teams own 20 total NCAA Field Hockey Championships, including eight by UNC.