Metzger and Wells hunt for one last wave

Wednesday, May 1, 1996

Childhood friends see long road culminate with NCAA’s in
PauleyBy Ruben Gutierrez

Daily Bruin Staff

It is 1986 on a hot summer day in Honolulu. Two young teenage
buddies, who have known each other since the fifth grade, decide to
go to the beach together to do some surfing. Carefree in their
youth, the boys play volleyball into the evening, just as they did
the day before and the day after.

It is 1996, on the home court of volleyball titan UCLA, the
first round of the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation playoffs.
With the players taking their positions to receive the serve, the
swing hitter looks smaller than everyone else, even the setter.

With the serve rapidly approaching, the swing expertly passes
the ball to the setter, the best player in the conference.

The setter has done this thousands of times before. With a
fiercely competitive glint in his eye, the setter simultaneously
extends his wrists and barks out orders.

"Get up, Wells!" the leader yells to the attacker.

On cue, the smaller man explodes, suddenly not looking so small,
thanks to his 40 inch vertical leap. He gets up, over the net and
sends one down the line for another kill.

Afterwards, the two teammates slap hands and it all looks
strangely familiar. It should. The setter, Stein Metzger and the
swing hitter, Brian Wells, have been at this together for
awhile.

"Where we played club at, the Outrigger Canoe Club, there were
three courts: two full courts and a baby court where all the little
kids would play," Metzger said. "Every day, we’d go and surf for a
couple of hours, then come in and play volleyball for a few hours,
then go surf …"

"Seven days a week," adds Wells.

When they were ready to enter high school in volleyball-crazed
Hawaii, naturally, the two attended Punahou and in doing so entered
the school’s storied program.

"Supposedly, there is a statistic that more players in the MPSF
have come out of that program than any other program, than any
other high school, any California high school or anything," Metzger
said. "That’s what our coaches used to tell us."

At Punahou, the two acquired an unparalleled volleyball
education under head coach Peter Balding. The former Pepperdine
star tirelessly drilled his players with fundamentals and more
fundamentals. Though it seemed monotonous at the time, the work on
the basics paid huge dividends. Punahou won its 11th straight state
title during Metzger’s and Wells’ senior year.

"In retrospect, I think we were really lucky to be coached by
who were, Peter Balding," Wells said. "Their work ethic and the way
they coached were so far different from UCLA. Regardless of the
skills you learned, they taught the fundamentals and how to work as
a team with teammates. I might have bitched then, but now I
consider myself really lucky to have been coached by them."

The news that Punahou was a prep powerhouse in the sport was no
secret to UCLA head coach Al Scates, who had been mining the
talent-rich school for years. Among the first of the Hawaiian
transplants, Scates brought Bruin great Peter Ehrman to the
mainland from Punahou. More recently, Punahou alum Kevin Wong, a
high school teammate of Wells and Metzger, started on two UCLA
national championship squads.

The latest Punahou heist has worked out superbly for UCLA this
season. Metzger became the UCLA career assists leader, despite
sitting behind All-American Mike Sealy his first two seasons en
route to being selected Mountain Pacific Sports Federation Player
of the Year. Wells, on the other hand, was a regular starter for
the Bruins for the first time in his five-year stint here.

According to many volleyball insiders, Metzger may be the best
player in the country, let alone the best setter, and he is the
main reason the Bruins are in a position to win their record 16th
NCAA title.

"He’s great," Long Beach State head coach Ray Ratelle said.
"He’s the reason they are where they’re at right now. I don’t think
there is any other setter in the country that could’ve done what
Stein did for UCLA."

According to Scates, Metzger sets the table for the Bruins with
his great all-around skills. Besides possessing excellent set
selection and ball placement, Metzger is also a threat as a blocker
and an attacker at the net. Scates loosely compares his all-around
ability to Karch Kiraly, arguably the most accomplished spiker to
don a UCLA jersey.

Despite all his talent, the driving force behind Metzger’s
success has and always will be his sharply honed competitive nature
which was shaped by his father, Bill.

"He played basketball at the University of Virginia and I grew
up playing basketball with him in the park," Metzger said. "He
would never let me win. He’d let me get close to make it kind of
competitive, but at the end, he’d be almost a dirty player and I
would not win because he had to win every time."

"Ever since then, I’ve played to win," he continued. "There was
always that feeling that winning was what made sports fun and even
if you didn’t win, striving to win and playing aggressively was
succeeding."

Given all this abundant and varied talent, along with his
win-at-all costs attitude, it would be hard to imagine a more
valuable commodity he could offer. He exceeds himself again,
however, with his leadership.

"I think from a setting standpoint, he’s the best setter in the
league, but from a leadership standpoint, he might be the best
leader in the league," said Cal State Northridge head coach John
Price. "That is something that is desperately lacking at a lot of
programs, including ours."

Wells, another fifth-year senior, also furnishes UCLA with a
veteran leader. The road to success has often been bumpier for
Wells than it was for Metzger. Coming to UCLA as a six-foot,
one-inch swing hitter, Wells’ prospects for immediate playing time
were bleak and he waited four years for a shot at significant court
time.

In his first season as a starter, Wells has performed better
than expected, most recently at the MPSF Tournament last
weekend.

"God, he played great, too," Ratelle said. "Brian has played
well for them all year long. He jumps great and he’s got great
quickness. He does a lot of things for them."

While the jaws opposing coaches and players fall when they see
the swing hitter rise, Metzger knew about Wells’ ups when they were
still kids skateboarding, pulling ollies off of a launch ramp in
Honolulu.

"In fifth or sixth grade, we made this ramp outside in my front
yard and we’d come flying down the hill on our skateboards and we’d
hit the ramp," he explained. "That’s where Brian first got his
nickname, ‘Superfly Bri-Bri.’ Brian would be out getting twice as
high as anybody else. That’s when we first saw that he was going to
be an incredible athlete."

Wells’ strong suit lies in his passing. That skill is another
outgrowth of the rigorous drills at Punahou, where coaches would
spend up to an hour serving balls at players to improve their
passes.

As Metzger puts it, Wells "passes nails" and opposing teams do
anything in their power to keep him from receiving their serve.

"He moves the ball around real well," Ratelle said. "His big
thing, of course, is passing. That means nobody is going to serve
him, they serve the other players whenever possible, but he takes
just as many balls as he can get his hands on."

Metzger and Wells will be playing in the NCAA Championships on
their home floor as the top seeds while the team from their home
state of Hawaii, against whom they have fought three pitched
battles this season, is seeded second

The stage is set for a fairy tale ending, but if you ask the two
boyhood friends, they knew, somehow, things might work out his
way.

"I think it was destiny that we were thrown together for all
these years," Metzger says.

"It had to be," agrees Wells.

ANDREW SCHOLER/Daily Bruin

Stein Metzger

ANDREW SCHOLER/Daily Bruin

Brian Wells