Dominance was the name of the game as the UCLA women’s volleyball team opened its season with three victories at the DoubleTree Los Angeles Westside Invitational at Loyola Marymount University.
The No. 12 Bruins (3-0) did not lose a set en route to commanding victories over Albany (0-3) and North Texas (1-2), setting the Bruins up for a grueling Saturday night contest with host Loyola Marymount (2-1), a match that the Bruins won 3-1.
Junior outside hitter Karsta Lowe’s cross-court kill, assisted by junior setter Megan Moenoa, capped off a tightly contested fourth set, which featured six lead changes and 12 ties.
The kill was Lowe’s career-high 23rd of the match and team-leading 52nd of the tournament. Whether working with Moenoa or junior setter Monica Stauber, Lowe could not be stopped as she proved to be an offensive tour de force.
“Karsta was … ridiculous. She’s a big-time talent,” said coach Michael Sealy, “She was always really good, but now I think she’s catching up to her body. She was really tall early (in her career) and now her strength is coming in, and her physicality is just unbelievable.”
Sealy said the team’s season-opening jitters were what caused UCLA to drop its first set against Loyola Marymount – its first set loss of the season.
“A lot of the girls, were playing for the first time, and there’s obviously a lot of pressure, but once they realized that it was just volleyball, the same things that we’d always done, we were able to get away from the expectations of having to do too much,” Sealy said.
Following its first lost set of the year, the team returned to form by settling in and winning the next three sets and the match.
The team opened the tournament by dispatching Albany 3-0, never trailing the Great Danes throughout the match.
The next day, the Bruins took on North Texas, and swept the Mean Green 3-0. Lowe led the team in kills, with 18, hitting .727. Stauber and Moenoa had 20 assists apiece in the contest.
“(In the first two matches), we passed well and were technically good on offense, executing a lot of the plays we had worked on in practice, and in general, there was a lot of communication among the whole team, both on and off the court,” Stauber said.
With a strong start the Bruins are looking to carry the momentum from this tournament to the rest of the season.
“I think that we really excel at playing with energy, and the way we balanced that (this weekend) with staying calm in tense situations – if we can keep that up, we’ll definitely do well,” Lowe said.
UCLA next plays Santa Clara University on Thursday in Honolulu in the first game of the Hawaiian Airlines Wahine Volleyball Classic.