Perhaps the best measuring stick for a team still looking to find its identity is a marquee matchup against the defending national champions. For the Bruins, the result of Tuesday night’s test suggests that there’s still some searching yet to be done.

The No. 5 UCLA men’s volleyball team (7-5, 3-3 Mountain Pacific Sports Federation) came up short against No. 2 UC Irvine (8-4, 4-2), ultimately losing in five sets in front of an energetic atmosphere at Pauley Pavilion.

Although recently they’ve fared well in matches that have gone the distance, the Bruins were thoroughly outplayed in the deciding set on Tuesday night. The Bruins dropped the first set of the night before winning the next two and taking the lead, but the wheels started to come off from that point forward.

“We definitely could’ve done a lot of things better, we kind of came out flat after we won those two games,” said redshirt junior setter Connor Bannan. “Give credit to Irvine, they played great and they’re a great team. They’ve been together for a long time so it’s not a team you can make consecutive errors against.”

It was a harsh result on the Bruins, who looked like the better team for large stretches of the match. But against the defending national champions, it just wasn’t enough.

“I thought we played pretty well, that’s a good team that we played and they just played better than us in the fourth and fifth set,” coach John Speraw said. “That’s the way this goes, but we just have to continue to learn from this and keep getting better.”

UC Irvine is indeed a top contender to repeat as national champions, but giving up a 2-1 set lead at home is certainly a squandered opportunity for a Bruin team which has high expectations of its own. However, heads were not down among the players after the match.

“I don’t think it’s as much about the result, it’s about the process,” said junior middle blocker Spencer Rowe. “It’s early in the season, we’re focused on just learning every game and making sure we get one percent better every day. While the loss hurts … it’s still very early and it’s not the end of the world.”

Serving as a subplot to the battle for better standing atop the MPSF was the fact that John Speraw was facing his former team, the team he coached to three national championships over the last six years.

“It was fun; it was good to see all those guys that I care about a lot,” Speraw said. “It was fun to reconnect and there were a lot of friends in the stands and a lot of people came to see, so it was a fun night for me overall.”

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