As the 2006 NCAA Tournament gets underway Saturday, the No. 2 Stanford women’s volleyball team is hosting a reunion of sorts. Two of the three visiting teams in the Palo Alto subregional played their first matches in Maples last year. Stanford will open the tournament against Sacramento State while No. 21 Santa Clara takes on newcomer Missouri.

The Cardinal will, however, be looking for a different outcome than last year’s matches — the Broncos (20-7, 9-5 West Coast Conference) knocked Stanford out of the playoffs in the second round last year.

The Cardinal, the top seed in the Austin, Texas Regional enter the postseason riding the high of a Pac-10 Conference Championship and a five-match winning streak which includes wins over No. 3 Washington, the sixth overall tournament seed, and fourth-seeded No. 4 UCLA. Even so, the postseason starts with a blank slate.

“This is like the start of a new season and we have lots of work to do,” coach John Dunning said. “But we have a lot of things going for us. We are very healthy compared to what we have been in past years, and we are also pretty well rested. And we are playing at home, so we feel pretty lucky.”

The Cardinal played the first round last year without sophomore Cynthia Barboza, who tore her ACL halfway through her freshman campaign, and with junior setter Bryn Kehoe still recovering from a broken hand. This year, both have played every match and Barboza leads the Cardinal offense in kills and aces. Kehoe was last week’s Pac-10 and national Player of the Week.

With a healthy roster, the Stanford squad seems poised to achieve its aim of peaking at the end of the season. Leading up to their 2004 national championship, the Cardinal kept improving through the postseason, and they look to do the same this year.

“You don’t go into it just trying to prepare for the next few games,” Dunning said. “We need to go into every week and work every day to improve. At this point in the season, teams are either rising or falling and there are very few standing still. I don’t think we fell too far, but we had a period in our season about three weeks ago that was pretty tough on us. Hopefully, that is going to be the only time that we feel that way.”

The Cardinal dropped a three-game match to No. 5 USC at home before beginning their winning streak with a win over UCLA. Since that four-game victory, Stanford has not lost a game.

“USC was on a mission to play us, no question,” Dunning said. “That’s a bit of a mismatch, so they beat us. And you learn from that. The next day we had very serious effort by many different people and great toughness, playing with heart and commitment to the task at hand — those are all cliches and that is exactly what happened against UCLA.”

The Cardinal will need to continue that dominance if they want to be the team to advance to Austin from a tough subregional. Saturday’s opponent will be Sacramento State (30-5, 15-1 Big Sky), five-time defending Big Sky Conference champion and a familiar foe for Stanford.

“Sac State has had a very good year,” Dunning said. “Debbie Colberg is a great coach and we have seen them a lot, almost every year it seems.”

Indeed, the match will be the third time in five years that these teams will meet in the first round. Stanford has never lost to the Hornets and swept them to open the 2002 and 2003 Tournaments.

Atlee Hubbard leads the Hornets with 485 kills this season, while Lindsay Haupt is second with 371 and a .338 hitting percentage. Setters Rose Burke and Melissa Melcher share the court and have together amassed a 13.53 assist average. Michelle Franz is Sacramento State’s top blocker with 219 on the season while libero Kristin Lutes has already notched 757 digs.

The Hornets come in riding a six-game winning streak and lost only to Portland State in the conference season. The only thing to interrupt their Big Sky dominance was a midseason non-conference loss to Santa Clara, their opening round opponent last year and the favorite in the other first round match in Maples.

Last year, the Broncos beat Sacramento State and then upset Stanford in the second round of the tournament. Two upsets later, Santa Clara found itself in the Final Four for the first time, where the Broncos lost to top-seeded Nebraska.

This year, they have struggled with injuries and roster turnover — setter Crystal Matich missed several weeks in the middle of the season and middle blocker Annalise Muratore left the team midseason — but they finished conference play strong.

“I haven’t seen Santa Clara since the start of the year and they are a little bit different now,” Dunning said. “Matich was out for a while, which is why they had some rough spots. But she’s back now and I’m sure they are playing great.”

The Broncos won four straight before falling to No. 17 San Diego in their conference finale. Matich, after missing nine matches, is back in the lineup and has helped her team to a .262 hitting percentage. Kim McGiven and Anna Cmaylo are the top offensive producers, with 383 and 360 kills respectively, and Cmaylo is hitting at a .407 clip on the season, the nation’s tenth highest average. Cmaylo also leads in blocks with 107 and libero Caroline Walters has a team-high 396 digs.

The Broncos start the tournament with the Missouri Tigers, the lone newcomer to Palo Alto. Stanford and Mizzou have faced one another only once before, a Cardinal sweep in 1997.

The Tigers finished 17-12, 11-9 in the Big 12 Conference and have not beaten a ranked team in their last five tries. Last year Missouri played in the Elite Eight after upsetting No. 12 Hawaii and they again face a tough road.

Missouri lost three of its last five matches but swept Texas Tech to close out the regular season. Jessica Vander Kooi is the Tigers’ top hitter with 440 kills and a .241 hitting percentage. Redshirt freshman setter Lei Wang has 1334 assists and is third on the team in digs. Libero Tatum Ailes, whose younger sister Gabi has committed to playing for Stanford next year, averages nearly five digs per game and Nicole Wilson and Vander Kooi each has more than 100 blocks.

Though Nebraska again received the top national seed, the Pac-10 sends seven schools to the postseason, including two Regional top seeds — Stanford in the Austin Regional and UCLA in Honolulu. USC is seeded fifth and Washington sixth, while California, Arizona State and Oregon have also extended their seasons.

“Everybody talked all year about how strong the Pac-10 was,” Dunning said. “To get seven teams in is amazing. To get four seeds that high is pretty rare, but we could tell in every match we played that it was true.”

The tournament was originally scheduled to open tonight, but inclement weather in the Midwest delayed Missouri’s travel plans and pushed the matches to Saturday and second round matches to Sunday.