Sometime during the UCLA men’s volleyball team’s grueling 10 attempts at game point in game four Friday night, the Bruins’ heart finally shone through.
It was the hardest match the Bruins said they have played this year, but they managed to fight off a feisty University of Pacific team in a lengthy two-hour-and-35-minute, five-game match: 30-26, 27-30, 28-30, 40-38, 15-12.
After defeating Stanford on Saturday 30-25, 30-28, 34-32, No. 8 UCLA extended its winning streak to four matches and improved its record to 7-6 overall and 5-5 in the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation.
Friday’s match began slowly for UCLA, as the Bruins had trouble finding the floor against the aggressive Pacific team. Collectively, the Tigers rank second in the league in digs, averaging 9.72 digs per game. In this match alone, they picked up 58 balls, an 11.6 average for the five-gamer.
“UOP is a scrappy team,” said senior opposite Steve Klosterman, who led the team with 15 kills Friday. “They got a lot of balls up. They’re really motivated.”
With the help of its back row chasing down balls and digging bullets, Pacific was able to take a 2-1 game lead on the Bruins. And just when UCLA looked to be down and out, coach Al Scates let freshman setter Kevin Ker take the wheel of the offense in game four.
“I had Kevin watching their middle blockers and reporting to me what they were doing during the match so that when he got in there, he knew what they were doing,” Scates said. “He was ready to play, that’s for sure.”
Down 18-14 as the end of the match loomed, Ker served up three aces to bring the Bruins back into contention. The first, a bullet, the second, a lunge and a near miss, and the third, a sinker, all aided in spurring on the Bruin comeback.
“Incredible serving,” Scates remarked. “If not for those three aces, we would have lost that game. He did a great job.”
“Lately, I’ve been missing my serves,” Ker said. “So I went back into practice and I was like, “˜I need to change something.’ I guess it worked.”
The Bruins had their first shot at winning game four up 29-28. But despite numerous Klosterman kills and UOP errors, UCLA was not able to seal the deal. The crowd stood in anticipation 10 times, but the Bruin supporters were finally at ease when a Tiger error sent the match into the fifth and final set.
“It showed a lot of character,” Klosterman said. “We’re not known as the scrappiest of teams. But we really had to get down there and see what we’re made of.”
After battling back from the deepest hole to win game four 40-38, UCLA was not about to let the match fall to pieces.
“We had to put a lot of heart especially in that fourth game,” Ker said. “We knew we had the momentum and we knew we that we could’ve gone out there and won that fifth game. And we did; we executed just perfectly.”
And Ker set his team to a .421 hitting percentage in game five, the highest of the night. Out to a 7-2 lead, UCLA did not look back. Despite a resurgence from the Tigers who closed the gap to 11-10, the Bruins got their final four points from a pair of Klosterman kills and two roofs from freshman redshirt quick hitter Brett Perrine, who recorded a team-high 10 block assists on the night.
With the weekend sweep, the Bruins are finally at .500 in league play.
“It feels really good to get back up to .500, and hopefully we’ll just keep going up from here,” sophomore redshirt quick hitter Jamie Diefenbach said.