Young, talented volleyball squads square off in conference semifinal

Get used to this.

If the youthful faces that will be on both sides of the net Thursday night are any indicator, UCLA men’s volleyball and Long Beach State should expect to find themselves locked in plenty of high-pressure, season-defining battles over the course of the next few seasons.

Before those future showdowns, though, there is a spot in the conference championship on the line this year.

The No. 2 seed Bruins (24-5) appear to have the upper hand over the No. 3 seed 49ers (24-6) going into Thursday’s Mountain Pacific Sports Federation semifinal match in Provo, Utah. UCLA leads the 2016 season series 2-0 thanks to an early-season thriller and a spring break stomp.

Previous victories only say so much, however, against a team that is growing up daily.

Just this week, Off the Block released its Freshmen All-American Team, which listed three Long Beach players in a group of the top five vote-getters nationwide.

Dominant performance after dominant performance leaves the volleyball world wondering how such youth can be so overpowering and impressive. Most recently it was Long Beach’s MPSF quarterfinal sweep of Pepperdine, in which the trio combined to tally 36 assists, 28 kills, 14 digs and nine block assists, that left an impression.

“I’m not sure they’re freshmen anymore,” said Long Beach coach Alan Knipe in an interview with the Daily 49er following the team’s quarterfinal win. “When they’ve played a whole season, I think they got over the freshman thing a long time ago and they realized they’re just playing volleyball.”

UCLA setter/hitter Micah Ma’a was the lone Bruin to make the Freshmen All-American roster, but four of the team’s other six starters are also underclassmen and none of them will graduate following the year. Not every team in the conference matches up to the 49ers like the Bruins do, and the MPSF semifinal will offer both squads a high-profile opportunity to assert a clear pecking order.

“They’re a really good team, really well-coached. And they’re probably the scrappiest team in our league – they dig a lot of balls,” said junior outside hitter Michael Fisher. “They don’t like to see balls hit the floor without some effort, so the toughest thing for us will be trying to get kills against them.”

Although opponents are tallying about eight digs per set against UCLA, Long Beach had an MPSF-high of 60 digs in its five-set January loss. The 49ers returned to a more reasonable nine per set in the March rematch, but it was still over the average that the Bruins have been accustomed to seeing.

While offense may potentially prove difficult, the defense will certainly be tested too.

Senior middle blocker Taylor Gregory is hitting .523 on the season and MPSF Freshman of the Year TJ DeFalco has lit up the Bruins in both of the teams’ earlier meetings. Add to that mix a red-hot outside hitter in Kyle Ensing and a reliable setter in Josh Tuaniga, and you get a juggernaut that UCLA’s head coach John Speraw succinctly described as sharp and crisp in routes and execution.

Long Beach won’t be the only challenger UCLA will be forced to handle. The altitude at BYU’s Smith Fieldhouse – an obstacle that is anything but young – has presented wrinkles in visitors’ game preparation for decades.

“I’ve been doing this a long time, been playing there a lot and I’ve heard a lot of different theories about exactly how you can prepare for it,” Speraw said. “You just gotta go there, hit the ball and start to adapt.”

The difficulty for UCLA comes from the discrepancies between thick sea-level air and thinner air in the mountains.

“The ball travels a lot further so you could hit a perfect serve and it’ll go a foot out,” said sophomore outside hitter Jake Arnitz. “The passing kind of catches you up a little higher because the ball is traveling further.”

For a team that relies on its ability to get opponents out of system with ferocious serving, those small changes could make major differences. Already, UCLA had been serving Long Beach easier than most opponents. The Bruins averaged just over one ace per set in the first matchup, but they’ve been scoring closer to two per set on the season.

“I think it’s a much bigger challenge for us to beat them at altitude,” Speraw said. “With our serve, we were able to get them in trouble last time, but it’s going to be much harder to do that this time. We’re going to have to figure out how to win with our block and our defense.”

UCLA was without junior middle blocker Mitch Stahl in the March win, but the veteran is back and healthy. Stahl was just named a finalist for the Ryan Millar Award this week, which honors the best middle attacker in the nation. He and redshirt sophomore Oliver Martin will anchor the Bruin block in hopes of limiting the firepower that the 49ers possess.

The youthful rivalry of UCLA-Long Beach is only in its opening act, but the stage is set for the future.