Volleyball offense lags behind

The UCLA women’s volleyball team has built up a sturdy defense.

Now it is time for the Bruins to focus on improving their offense.

After the first week of conference play, UCLA is ranked second in digs in the Pac-10.

The Bruins are also ranked last in hitting percentage.

While the Bruins started the season off hitting strongly against nonconference teams, UCLA saw a drop in its hitting percentage against USC in Friday’s Pac-10 opener. The team hit a season-low .092 against the Trojans.

The Bruins’ downfall was in the fourth and fifth games, when they appeared to tire out. The team had negative hitting percentages in both of those games.

While UCLA’s defense helped keep the Bruins in the five-game match against USC, the low hitting percentage gave coach Andy Banachowski reason to worry about the team’s offense.

Banachowski said the offense is not where he would like it to be at this point in the season.

“I thought our backcourt was great,” he said. “Overall, I think the thing we need to shore up is our attack and do better with our attack.”

Each time the Bruins have had a strong hitting night this season, the team has walked away with a win.

In all of its victories, UCLA has not hit under .218 as a team. In both of UCLA’s losses this season, the team saw a drop in their hitting performance. When Penn State beat the Bruins last month, all of UCLA’s starting hitters finished under .200 in hitting percentage.

One of UCLA’s goals all season has been to intensify its offense.

Unfortunately for the team, senior hitter Kaitlin Sather, last season’s leader in kills per game, is out due to a right bicep injury. Hoping to fill the void, UCLA has relied on the addition of freshmen middle blockers Amanda Gil and Katie Camp.

While Gil and Camp are both hitting above the .300 mark for the season, the low numbers against USC show that with the increased the level of competition that the Bruins will be facing for the rest of the Pac-10 season, there may come some struggles.

Camp, who had a close-to-perfect game against Virginia earlier this month, hit -.176 against the Trojans.

Senior defensive specialist Jade Machado is one part of the Bruins’ strong defense. As one of the players who has to be ready to cover the hitters on every attack, she said she hopes the poor offensive performance against USC was a one-time thing.

“It just didn’t work out for us,” Machado said. “Everyone was trying as hard as they could. We just didn’t have it tonight.”

Before UCLA faces Oregon and Oregon State for this weekend, Banachowski will be running offense-minded drills in practice, hoping to cut down on errors.

“We certainly need to spend time working on our offense, running some play sets and working on hitting with a little more power,” Banachowski said.

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