After two wins against tough conference opponents that turned the tide for UCLA’s season, a young but determined men’s volleyball team will attempt to continue its winning streak tonight at Long Beach State.
No. 5 UCLA (10-7, 8-6) is coming off impressive wins last week against Cal State Northridge and No. 3 UC Santa Barbara that solidified its place as one of the best teams in the country. Against CSUN, the Bruins pulled off a three-game sweep while senior Steve Klosterman was able to rack up a career-high 31 kills and a 0.667 attack percentage, all within the time frame of those three games.
Friday night, UCSB and its leader Evan Patak were the next victims of UCLA’s hot hitters. Patak, who led the nations in aces per game and was fourth in kills per game, was held to just 13 kills. Klosterman smacked another 23 kills, senior Paul George added 16, and the Bruins were able to upset the Gauchos in four games, 3-1.
For his performances, Klosterman was named the Sports Imports/AVCA National player of the Week and UCLA Muscle Milk Student-Athlete of the Week. Freshman setter Kevin Ker was also instrumental in both matches, finding and setting to the hot hitter and even setting a career-high 59 assists against UCSB.
With these two wins, the Bruins have won seven of the last eight with three straight and are looking to add more.
Heading into tonight’s game, No. 14 Long Beach State is coming off a three-game losing streak that it’s looking to halt. 49ers Paul Lotman and Norm Hutton are two players that UCLA coach Al Scates said need to be controlled in order to win.
“Their opposite (Hutton) went off on us last year during the league playoffs,” Scates said. “We managed to beat Long Beach anyways but he had a real good match. We have to respect him, then Lotman is getting over five kills a game and he’s hitting about .330, so they’ve got two really good hitters.”
The Bruins have lost four straight matches at Long Beach and will be looking to end the streak. If the Bruins want to continue to mold themselves into a championship-caliber team, they will need to halt that statistic. But nothing but optimism is seeping from this Bruin team, who is confident in its ability to do so.
“Although we’re actually better now than we were last year at the same time, we have to continue improving and I think we’re capable of doing that,” Scates said.
“Fortunately, we have two league matches against Irvine and we’ll be able to gauge our strength against that team, who’s currently ranked No. 2. Then, we have another match against Pepperdine, so we do play the first- and second-ranked teams and any weaknesses will show in those matches that we still have to work on.”
Can the team make the same run it did last year? According to George, anything can happen.
“The train is on its way,” George said. “A 14-game win streak is pretty impressive. … Anything is possible. Any team can win on any given day. We just need to keep working hard and take it one day at a time.”