The plan for the men’s volleyball team’s road trip to Stanford and Pacific this weekend was simple: win out and guarantee home-court advantage for the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation quarterfinals.
The Bruins did wind up with home-court advantage in the first round ““ they will host Pepperdine next Saturday ““ but they hardly took the simple route.
The No. 7 Bruins did sweep last-place Pacific on Saturday night, 30-24, 30-23, 30-23, but not until after they had fallen to No. 8 Stanford on Friday night in four games, 30-24, 27-30, 20-30, 28-30, making the playoff picture much more complicated.
The Bruins improved to 17-13 overall and 12-10 in the MPSF. But Stanford’s win over No. 9 UC Irvine, combined with No. 5 Pepperdine’s loss to an ailing No. 13 Hawai’i team created a three-way tie for fourth place between the Bruins, the Cardinal, and the Waves.
Since the fourth seed is the final seed to host a quarterfinal match and the first three seeds had already been locked up by Long Beach State, BYU, and Cal State Northridge, wins this weekend were vital to gaining home-court advantage.
UCLA owns the tiebreak over Pepperdine and Pepperdine owns the tiebreak over Stanford, so UCLA will face Pepperdine at Pauley Pavilion on Saturday.
Against Pacific, the Bruins came out hitting hard, starting out 5-1 before a Pacific time-out. Pacific came out of the time-out and narrowed the gap to 7-4, but the Bruins took off from there to close out the first game.
The second game played out in almost the same way. The Tigers gave the Bruins a scare when they briefly closed to within 13-12 after a couple of attack errors by Bruin outside hitters Sean O’Malley and Garrett Muagututia, but the Bruins had four kills and only one error from that point on to close out the second game similarly.
The Tigers opened the third game, shocking the Bruins with a 4-0 start. After a UCLA time-out, the Bruins did not seem to improve and the Tigers continued to pour on the assault, with six kills and only two errors until UCLA caught up to tie the game at 14.
After that point, the Bruins ran away with the win to close out their regular season with a sweep.
Coach Al Scates went with his starters the entire match except when he brought in freshman Weston Dunlap for redshirt junior Jamie Diefenbach early in the third game.
The focus of the team’s practice before leaving for the road trip was serving. The Bruins apparently served better, scoring on over 40 percent of their serves.
“I thought we served tough (against Pacific),” Scates said. “(Middle blocker D.J. Stromath’s) serve is the best it’s been all year.”
Friday night’s match against Stanford did not go as well for the Bruins.
Though they led the entire first game, the Bruins seemed to fall late in the second game.
They could not keep their strong hitting and serving, and four of the Cardinal’s last nine points came off UCLA service errors. The Bruins also struggled to hit the ball well.
“We lost the battle at the net,” Scates said. “Stanford just played better than we did, that’s for sure.”
Though Muagututia pounded out 22 kills for a .300 clip and Diefenbach hit .368 with 10 kills, the rest of the Bruins hit only .138 and had only 26 kills.
But perhaps the biggest victory for the Bruins this weekend came when Hawai’i defeated Pepperdine. After losing to Stanford, Scates expected to play at Pepperdine, as the Waves were playing a Warriors squad missing their two best players.
“I think (the home-court advantage) is important because Pepperdine has a pretty strange gym with a lot of rafters,” Scates said. “Dig a high ball and you’ve got some pretty random bounces.
“It’ll give an opportunity to our fans to support us too.”