Fickle season comes to finish
By Allison Ho
April 22, 2008 10:52 p.m.
Every night was a coin toss for this season’s men’s volleyball team.
Either Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde would show up at the Bruins’ matches, but they did not know which.
This unpredictability cost No. 6 UCLA an NCAA championship this year.
Finishing the 2008 season with a 17-14 overall record, the Bruins fell to No. 5 Pepperdine Saturday night. It was a culmination of a year of surprising losses and unforeseen victories.
“This year was an up-and-down year for us,” coach Al Scates said. “We just couldn’t perform at a steady level. When you have peaks and valleys, that’s not a team that can go through the playoffs and win five tough matches.”
UCLA’s longest winning streak ““ four matches ““ occurred early on in the season, when the team knocked off Hawai’i, Stanford, Pacific and UC San Diego in January.
But the Bruins did not seem to have the staying power to keep their engines running for every match, and couldn’t muster a three-game win streak in the final two months of the season.
“It’s all about mentality,” senior Tony Ker said.
“That’s why we lost to those teams earlier on in the season. If they can get back that killer instinct, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t win a national championship (next year).”
The Bruins upset many top-ranked teams along their journey. They defeated current No. 1 Long Beach State at the Pyramid, beat BYU when it was No. 1 and swept Pepperdine during the regular season.
But the Bruins also fell to lower-ranked teams, experiencing their first loss ever to UC San Diego and getting swept by crosstown rival USC.
“I can’t help but say it’s disappointing because we all felt like, when we were playing well, we were one of the best teams in the league,” redshirt junior Jamie Diefenbach said. “We just played really inconsistently this year.”
“That’s frustrating when you have the talent and you don’t put it in every night. We have a great group of guys.”
The 2008 squad featured a promising pool of talent, including returnees Ker, Diefenbach, Brett Perrine, Garrett Muagututia and setters Matt Wade and Kevin Ker. But the Bruins just could not pull all that talent together each and every night.
The roller coaster ride of a season also extended to the UCLA hitters, as there was no go-to hitter for a big chunk of the season.
Different hitters were hot on different nights, but never dependably so. Only in the last month of play did outside hitter Sean O’Malley step up his play and lead the Bruins consistently at the net.
That same inconsistency from which the Bruins suffered was a theme among other teams in the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation.
There were upsets galore in the conference matchups, with a surprising disappointment from reigning NCAA champion UC Irvine, who finished eighth in the league, and some remarkable upsets by UC San Diego, which defeated traditional powerhouses UC Irvine and UC Santa Barbara .
“A couple of the refs, before the season even started, said, “˜I guarantee you that there’s going to be a lot of coin tosses at the end of the year to decide where everyone was going to be placed,’ and they were right,” Tony Ker said. “So many people were beating so many other people. There’s not that major domination that there was way back in the day.”
“The parity in this season’s league was just tremendous. It was ridiculous.”
It just so happened that in the end the coin fell on the wrong side for the Bruins.
