Ask any coach in the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation what
defines their men’s volleyball league, they’ve all said
the same thing.
Any team can beat any team on any given night in the MPSF.
It’s something UCLA (16-12, 8-10 MPSF) hopes to avoid this
weekend when it takes on 11th-placed Stanford and 10th-placed
University of Pacific. The Cardinal and the Tigers have sat at the
bottom of the 12-team conference standings for the entire season,
but the Bruins are not taking them lightly.
“Numbers-wise they’re weaker, but I think that
anyone can beat anyone,” redshirt senior outside hitter
Damien Scott said. “We need to make sure we’re not in
any condition to relax.”
The Bruins cannot afford to overlook any opponent right now. The
Bruins are in seventh place in the MPSF standings, and battling to
make the eight-team MPSF Tournament, which they have not missed
since 2003.
Though it is highly unlikely that either Stanford or Pacific
will make the playoffs, both teams have shown the ability to run
with the top dogs. In early March, the Tigers held off now-No. 4
Cal State Northridge and swept No. 7 UCSB.
“Pacific has been playing really well lately,”
sophomore libero Tony Ker said. “They’ve had some
upsets … so we have to go into both of these games playing as
hard as we can. We don’t want to have any chances of losing
and not being able to get in the playoffs.”
“We know what they’re capable of, and they’re
for real,” UCLA coach Al Scates said. “All four of
these teams that we have left can play. In our league, there are no
bad teams.”
Stanford (4-20, 2-16) will have incentive of its own to win, as
the team will soon say goodbye to its head coach Don Shaw at the
end of this season.
“They’re going to get up for us because this is
their coach’s day,” Scates said. “They’re
having a pregame reception for him and a big party afterwards for
him, so he’d love to go there a winner, I’m
sure.”
Though UCLA is well aware of what Stanford and Pacific (7-17,
5-13) have in store, the Bruins are thankful nonetheless for a
relatively easy end-of-season schedule the rest of the way. Though
they will take on Northridge and UCSB next week, the schedule could
have been a lot tougher.
“It is definitely a nicer schedule because it would be a
lot more pressure on us having the Pepperdine, BYU or UCI matches
towards the end,” Scott said.
“Those are the top teams, and it’s good that
we’ve gotten past all those guys, Ker agreed. “I
definitely like the remaining teams that we have. Now we can just
focus on these teams.”
But with the way the Bruins played in their sweep of Long Beach
State last week, they feel confident in playing any team right
now.
“Anybody that we’d play right now, I think
we’d give them a good match no matter what,” redshirt
senior Nick Scheftic said. “We came off a strong week last
week. We just wanna get another strong week this week and keep that
momentum into the playoffs.”