Follow
Two teams that met in the Final Four last season will close out the 2013 regular season against each other.
UC Irvine announced Monday its schedule for the upcoming season and revealed that it would play a non-conference match against Penn State in its regular season finale on April 13.
The defending NCAA champion Anteaters defeated the Nittany Lions in four games in the NCAA Tournament semifinals in May en route to winning their third national title in the last season years.
This will be the third time in the last four years that UC Irvine and Penn State have played each other in the regular season. The road team in this match-up has won the last two meetings with the Nittany Lions in 2010 winning at Irvine, Calif., and the Anteaters in 2011 winning at University Park, Pa.
Penn State has reached the four-team NCAA Tournament 14 consecutive years. It also enters this season having won more than 50 consecutive EIVA matches with its last conference loss coming in 2008.
UC Irvine returns a majority of starters from its 2012 championship team. However, the Anteaters will be without former head coach John Speraw, who resigned from the school in the summer to become the head coach at UCLA.
The match against the Nittany Lions will be the Anteaters’ fifth and final non-conference match during the upcoming season.
UC Irvine will open its season with four non-conference matches as it plays host to Concorida-Irvine on Jan. 2. The team later in that opening week will then participate in the two-day UC Santa Barbara Invitational.