The offseason is here, with all of Arizona’s sports done for 2024-25 season and the 2025-26 campaigns still a little ways away.
Which makes this a great time to step back and see how all of the Wildcats’ programs are doing and how they’ve handled the move from the Pac-12 to the Big 12
Over the next few weeks we’ll take a look at each of the UA’s men’s and women’s athletic programs to see what shape they’re in and what prospects they have for the near future. We’ll break down each team and evaluate how it is performing under its current coaching staff, looking at the state of the program before he/she arrived and comparing it to now while also evaluating how that program fits into its new conference.
Next up: Steve Walker’s beach volleyball team
How it looked before
Walker has been Arizona’s head coach since the UA introduced beach volleyball in 2013. Over the last decade plus, Walker has kept Arizona competitive on a national level, though never quite up there with the sport’s elite programs. Arizona has posted a winning record in every season under Walker’s watch. The Wildcats made the NCAA Beach Volleyball Championship in 2016, the year the sport became sanctioned by the NCAA. Arizona hasn’t made it back to the NCAAs since, in part because it competed in the Pac-12 for the majority of that time, and the league’s auto bid always went to one of the Southern California schools.
Where things stand now
Arizona is coming off an 18-12 season in which it lost all its matches to ranked opponents. The Wildcats went 0-2 against rival ASU, losing at home 4-1 and getting swept in Tempe. It was the first season in program history that Arizona went winless against the Sun Devils. Arizona put one player on the Big 12 All-Conference Team: Ashlyn Zilliken, a rising junior. The Texas native led the team in wins with 21, tied for eighth-most in program history in a single season,
Big 12 vs. Pac-12
By moving to the Big 12, Arizona’s program stands to benefit in the long run by having a better opportunity at securing a precious auto bid to the NCAA Championship. UCLA and USC have dominated beach volleyball since the sport’s inception, and one of the two programs had won every NCAA championship until this year. Maybe it’s Arizona’s luck, but the top power in the sport now resides in the Big 12: TCU. The Horned Frogs won the NCAA title this year and also took home the Big 12 championship. Only four Big 12 teams sponsor beach volleyball: Arizona, ASU, TCU and Utah. Arizona went 0-2 in the Big 12 Tournament, getting swept by ASU and Utah.
One big question
How much will Arizona invest in beach volleyball? Arizona’s 18 wins in 2025 were the program’s fewest since 2017. Part of that could be losing some key seniors from the previous year and having a younger roster overall. However, Arizona’s level of competition last season was a step down from the Pac-12 gauntlet, yet the program won fewer matches. The way the season ended with back-to-back sweeps to ASU and Utah was discouraging. While Walker doesn’t appear to be on the hot seat, it’s not a great look that Arizona is decidedly the third-best program in its own state behind ASU and GCU. In the new college athletics revenue sharing model, Walker needs to prove beach volleyball is a program worth putting serious cash into. The best way to do that would be to improve next season.