Five teams from the United States and Canada are participating in the 2025 North American Challenge tournament, which began yesterday at the Walter Pyramid arena at Long Beach State University, California. Long Beach State, where three Bulgarians play (Lazar Buchkov, Simeon Nikolov, and Aleksandar Kandev), starts the tournament as No. 2 from last season. Alan Knipe's boys decisively won their first match against Saskatchewan with a 3-0 score (25:23, 25:21, 25:19), with all three of our compatriots in the starting six.

The player of the match for LB was Skyler Varga, who scored 12 points in attack with 64.7% efficiency. He also added five digs and two aces in the match.

In their second match, Long Beach State gave no chance to Trinity Western, with a 3-0 victory (25:15, 25:17, 25:15) coming in less than an hour. The "Beach," who played in the NCAA National Championship final last year, easily overcame the "Spartans" in the second match of the day, although the head-to-head record is still in favor of Trinity Western, who have 4 wins and 3 losses.

Sotiris Siapanis was the top scorer for "Beach" with 11 points in attack, followed by Skyler Varga with 9 and Danil Hershchynovych with 8 points.

The final match for the hosts from Long Beach is against the University of Calgary.