This is gonna be pretty long, but there's a lot of background info and context needed to understand why BYU has managed to become a consistent men's volleyball program. Volleyball is a big deal in California, especially SoCal. Whereas many states don't have boys volleyball in high school, every single high school has it here. Even the really ghetto ones (they aren't any good at it for the most part, but it's practically unheard of for a school not to have a boys volleyball team here. It would be like a high school in Indiana not having a basketball team). It's not uncommon for the BMOC to be a volleyball player, especially in the Orange County high schools as well as places like Santa Barbara and Ventura. Some of the eastern states have boys volleyball, but the undisputed mecca of boys volleyball in the country is California (there's some solid boys volleyball in the Las Vegas area as well as parts of Arizona, but those are both connected to the SoCal volleyball scene, as all the good players from those areas play on travel ball teams in the offseason that travel to SoCal to compete). Hawaii is the only state that takes boys volleyball anywhere near as seriously as California does, but their isolation prevents them from developing it quite as strongly as California does.

As a result of this, the largest recruiting pool for talented college volleyball players is in California. It's really lopsided. Even solid Midwest/East Coast men's college volleyball rosters have a whole lot of Californians on them. Ohio State, for example, has a team this season that is a little over 50% percent Californians. This is why the MPSF is far and away the best men's volleyball conference in the country. Their home turf is where the vast majority of the nation's talent comes from. So the secret to being a consistently great men's college volleyball program is to have a solid recruiting pipeline in California. Yes, some of the California teams struggle despite having a built-in recruiting pipeline there, but they don't have much of a shot at the best players. It's like how the University of North Texas doesn't have that great of a football program. Yes, they have a Texas recruiting pipeline, but only for the lower-tier players. Out of state powerhouses like Michigan or Alabama have a better recruiting pipeline established in Texas, as far as the top players are concerned. Same thing applies to programs like Northridge and Cal Baptist. They're not seriously in contention for most of the top men's VB recruits.

BYU, however, has a special pipeline that pretty much no other schools have access to. I mentioned how big boy's volleyball culture is here. Well, there are some quirks within that culture. One is that most of the best players come from rich areas. Whereas pretty much any random person has easy access to a basketball court or baseball field, that's not the case with volleyball courts. Yeah, a lot of parks and beaches have sand courts, but you're not gonna become a top-level volleyball player just by playing and practicing on a sand court. You need steady access to indoor courts and all the needed equipment. Rich kids can afford to play on pricey club teams nearly year-round, so they have that steady access to indoor courts. The only other group that has steady access to an indoor court and the needed equipment is... LDS kids. You see, pretty much every church building here has either floor sleeves and the accompanying stanchions/ net or a portable volleyball net system. Stake centers, minor ward buildings, even the building for that ward way out in the boonies. And LDS kids in California play a lot of sports. I'm from a fairly ghetto part of LA County, and the preferred extracurricular activities for high school students here are drugs, alcohol, gangs, sex, and sports. Which leaves LDS kids here with only one real option. Sure, the non-athletic ones might get really into music or art, but for the most part here, LDS kids are really into sports. So, LDS kids make up a disproportionate amount of high school athletes. Combine that with our steady access to indoor volleyball courts, and we make up a really lopsided proportion of boy's volleyball players here. For example, my high school had about 3,500 students in it, about 50-75 of which were LDS. Yet nearly 50% of our boy's volley ball team was LDS. The super ghetto high school in our district had maybe 10 Mormons in the entire school, and 3 of them were on their boy's volleyball team. The high school Ryan Millar played for was in my district (it's the richest school in our district, so their boy's volleyball pedigree is fairly solid), and even there about a quarter of both their varsity and JV teams were LDS.

So, as a result of this unique LDS/SoCal volleyball connection, BYU has a recruiting pipeline that most non-California schools can only dream of. Due to the logistics associated with missions, the top California college programs don't often invest quite as much effort and respect into recruiting the top LDS volleyball players as they do the non-LDS ones. Like, they still want the top LDS players to go there, but they don't treat them as well as they would as if they weren't LDS. I've seen the recruiting process happen firsthand, and the best way I can explain it is that top California programs like UCLA and UC Irvine recruit 5 star LDS volleyball players the same way they would recruit a 3 star non-LDS player. They want them, but they aren't willing to promise them as much as their talent level deserves. As a result of that, a mindset developed within the LDS volleyball community in SoCal that it's almost always automatically better to play for BYU, where you know for a fact that you won't be treated like a second class player. Other schools act like working out the mission logistics is such a huge hassle and you should be eternally grateful for them being willing to work around that, but with BYU you don't have to worry about that. So, there's a pretty much automatic pipeline of the best LDS men's volleyball players in SoCal to BYU.

Basically, due to some unique cultural issues, a large subset of the largest talent pool for recruiting talented men's college volleyball players has an automatic recruiting pipeline with an out of state school. This is why BYU is so consistently good. It's also why the other MPSF schools have some resentment towards BYU. Because it's now very difficult for them to crack that pipeline that makes BYU so consistently good. A few decades ago they could have prevented all of this if they would have treated the LDS volleyball players better, but now that BYU is so consistently great, that pipeline is pretty much set in stone and unbreakable, and so it becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.