With a round trip from Los Angeles to Muncie, Ind. to face the Ball State program, the men’s volleyball team sought to end its two-game losing streak. But instead, the 4,000 mile trip ended in a four-match losing streak for the No. 7-ranked Bruins.
Still struggling to find the heat in their fire power, the Bruins dropped both matches this weekend to the No. 15 Cardinals, losing in four sets on Friday 23-30, 30-24, 19-30, 24-30, and in three straight sets Saturday 21-30, 26-30, 24-30. Because Ball State participates in the Midwest Intercollegiate Volleyball Association rather than the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation, neither team faced a change in league standings, however the Cardinals improved to 12-6 while the Bruins fell to 10-9.
The two losses mark the fifth and sixth in eight matches for UCLA.
Seeking to find a hot hand to ease UCLA’s offensive woes, coach Al Scates mixed up his lineup in many unconventional ways. The 45-year veteran coach has been pulling everything out of his sleeve lately.
For the Midwest trip, he brought along lettermen who had suited up previously but had not seen action, including Shaun Nichols and Kent Kraushaar. He also played the musical chair game, swapping over quick hitter Weston Dunlap to the right side and opposite Brett Perrine to the middle.
Yet nothing seemed to work.
“We were trying to (find a solid lineup) but still didn’t find a solution,” Scates said.
On the first night, the Bruins started off well, slamming down an efficient .417 hitting percentage. However, that dropped off for the remainder of the night and of the weekend. UCLA dropped to .043 in the following three sets and .126 the following night.
“Passing was pretty good, we just couldn’t put the ball away,” Scates said. “We just need some fire power, someone who can put the ball away.”
Though the Bruins had muscled out a four-game win over the Cardinals earlier in the season at the Outrigger Hotels Invitational, this weekend proved to be a totally different breed of competition.
Absent in January were the Ball State hard-hitters Patrick Durbin and Todd Chamberlain, both of whom posed a formidable threat this weekend, putting down over a third of the Cardinals’ total kills. This, in addition to an inability to take care of business on UCLA’s side of the court, made all the difference between the January matchup and this weekend’s meetings, Scates said.
With two more matches coming up early in the week, the Bruins need to fix their problem fast. And they will start first thing Monday.
“We’ll be working on serve reception and side-outs,” Scates said. “We scored well enough on our serve, but we need to side-out at a much greater rate (70 percent) and we were nowhere near that.”