The usually stoic men’s volleyball coach, John Speraw, pumped his fist after a few long rallies and grimaced after his Bruins lost a few points they should’ve won on Saturday night.
It was obvious there was more on the line for this one.
The stakes were raised in the win-or-go-home playoff situation, but No. 4 UCLA came through on Saturday to win in straight sets over No. 5 Pepperdine and advance to the semifinals of the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation conference tournament.
Midway through the season, few people would’ve put money on the Bruins to get this far, but players said they have undergone a steep transformation to put themselves in position to accomplish something special.
“I feel in a lot of ways this team is exceeding expectations from the beginning of the year,” Speraw said. “When you’ve grown like that as a team and learned as much as we’ve learned you go into these matches with quite a bit of confidence.”
It had been a long eight days since the Bruins had last taken the court and swept the Trojans in the regular season finale: eight days to get ready for the Waves, but also eight days of anxious buildup.
“All of us had been talking about this since our last match against USC,” said redshirt junior outside hitter Dane Worley. “This whole week we’ve been watching film and doing so much preparation. We had all of this pent-up energy from the long week of training. But it all worked out tonight.”
The Bruins had little problem in claiming the first set, and it looked as though it would be smooth sailing again in the second set until Pepperdine went on a run to trim a big Bruin lead to just one point at 19-18. Speraw called a timeout at what was effectively the critical point in the match.
I told them we had to continue to respect our opponent,” Speraw said. “No matter how well you think you’re playing or how you feel about your matchup with a particular opponent, you always have to know either before the match starts or within a match that they can make a comeback, so we had a little chat about that.”
UCLA came out of the timeout and won five straight points to close out the set and take firm control of the match. From then on Pepperdine looked disheartened, as if the wind had been knocked out of the team.
Pepperdine’s most dangerous offensive player, Maurice Torres, was kept relatively quiet. It was the third time this year that the Bruins had shut down the Waves’ opposite.
“Maurice never scares us, we have his number and we know how to defend him,” said junior middle blocker Spencer Rowe. “We knew where to put our block, we knew where to put our defenders, and when we execute against him good things happen.”
Immediately after the match, a handful of Bruin players crowded around a nearby laptop to watch the end of the BYU-Hawai’i match, the match which would determine who the Bruins would face in the semifinals. Top-ranked BYU survived a scare and ultimately saw off Hawai’i, setting up a highly anticipated UCLA-BYU matchup.
“We’re on a roll, the first one’s always the hardest I think,” said Rowe. “Now that we got that first win, we’re excited to have the opportunity to play again.”