After dropping out of the top 5 for the first time in nearly two months, the Grand Canyon University Club Baseball team began its move back towards that group, rising to No. 6 in the latest National Club Baseball Association (NCBA) Rawlings Division I Poll. It's the fifth time in the seven regular season polls this season that the Lopes either improved on or maintained their national ranking, and it's one notch higher than the No. 7 ranking that the Lopes held in the previous poll in late April. It's also the fifth consecutive poll that the NCBA Top 10 included the Lopes.
 
The national improvement stems in part from the Lopes' impressive finish to the regular season: a methodical three-game sweep of Northern Arizona University two weekends ago. The Lopes needed two wins in the final three-game Southern Pacific South Conference series to clinch their third consecutive SoPac South regular season title, but after accomplishing that with 5-2 and 11-1 wins in the Saturday doubleheader, GCU finished strong with a 7-0 shutout in the Sunday finale at Colter Baseball Field on the GCU campus to post their 20^th overall win of the 2022 campaign.
 
What stands between the Lopes (20-8 overall, 11-1 SoPac South) and a fourth straight trip to the NCBA DI World Series is the 2022 SoPac Regional Tournament, which will send the Lopes back to the longtime home of the tournament, Lancaster, California, May 13 through 15. GCU already knows two of the other three participants: No. 5 ranked California Polytechnic State University (the SoPac West Champion) and SoPac North Champion University of Calfornia-Davis. The fourth 'at-large' bid – as well as the bracket and game times – are still yet to be announced.
 
The current NCBA Rankings are listed below:

Rank	Team	Total Pts	Prev Rank
1	Virginia Tech	395	1
2	Penn State	357	3
3	Florida State	334	4
4	Delaware	310	2
5	Cal Poly	309	8
6	Grand Canyon	299	7
7	Oregon State	271	9
8	East Carolina	242	12
9	Utah State	241	10
10	Texas A&M	171	16
11	Iowa	165	11
12	Connecticut	134	14
13	Michigan	113	5
14	UCLA	112	13
15	Nebraska	111	15
16	Ohio State	105	17
17	Michigan State	100	NR
18	Oregon State	68	NR
19	Wisconsin	62	NR
20	Notre Dame	61	NR