Sports in Brief: Lions return to volleyball final

Three-time defending national champion Penn State advanced to the NCAA volleyball national title game, sweeping Texas in the semifinals Thursday night in Kansas City, Mo.

Blair Brown had 12 kills, Deja McClendon 11, and Ariel Scott 10 in Penn State's 25-13, 25-13, 25-22 victory.

Penn State (31-5) came back from a two-game deficit to beat Texas in last year's championship match. This time, the Nittany Lions opened big leads in the first two games and then used powerful kills by Brown and Scott to finish off the Longhorns (27-6) in the third.

Penn State will face California (30-3) on Saturday night in the championship match. The Golden Bears beat Southern California, 25-14, 25-17, 25-20, with all-American Tarah Murrey pounding 23 kills.

SWIMMING: American Ryan Lochte was already being labeled the top swimmer of 2010, ahead of even Michael Phelps. Now he has another title to brag about. Lochte snapped swimming's world-record drought, setting the first individual mark since bodysuits were outlawed at the start of the year.

He won the 400-meter individual medley at the short-course world championships in 3 minutes, 55.50 seconds, smashing the previous record set by Laszlo Cseh of Hungary by nearly two seconds.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Bloomsburg's Franklyn Quiteh, a redshirt freshman who led Division II with 2,015 yards rushing, and Central Missouri quarterback Eric Czerniewski, who passed for more than 5,000 yards, were selected to the Associated Press Little all-America team, honoring the top players from Divisions II and III and the NAIA.

Slippery Rock University senior kicking specialist C.J. Bahr will be among the participants Saturday in Minneapolis in an All-American Bowl all-star game featuring players from Division II and Division III schools and other free agents.

An Indiana prosecutor says his office won't pursue criminal charges in the case of a St. Mary's College student who accused a Notre Dame football player of sexual battery. St. Joseph County Prosecutor Michael Dvorak said the decision was based on the fact that statements by Elizabeth "Lizzy" Seeberg, 19, would likely be inadmissible in court. Seeberg died of a suspected drug overdose Sept. 10. Dvorak said Seeberg had accused the athlete, who was not named, of touching her breasts.

HORSE RACING: With a victory by Communicator in the first race Wednesday afternoon at Maryland's Laurel Park, trainer Scott Lake reached a personal milestone with the 5,000th career win. He becomes just the sixth trainer to reach 5,000 victories.

Lake, 45, a native of Harrisburg, has been the dominant trainer at Parx Racing the last decade, winning eight training titles since 1999. In 2000, he finished second in the voting for the Eclipse Award as the nation's top trainer.

SOCCER: The Union have hired Rick Jacobs, who spent 25 years at the helm of the boys' soccer team at St. Benedict's Prep in Newark, N.J., as vice president of operations.

Qatar held on for a morale-boosting, 2-1 win over Egypt on Thursday in its first match since winning the right to host the 2022 World Cup. The friendly match at the Khalifa Stadium in Doha, Qatar, attracted a capacity crowd of nearly 50,000.

The semifinals of next year's CONCACAF Gold Cup will be played at Houston's Reliant Stadium on June 22. The quarterfinals will be at the New Meadowlands Stadium on June 18 in East Rutherford, N.J., and the next day at RFK Stadium in Washington.

The final for soccer's regional championship of North and Central America and the Caribbean will be held June 25 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif. - Associated Press