The UCLA men’s volleyball team took care of the visiting Princeton Tigers in three sets (25-18, 25-21, 25-21) on Sunday night in the John Wooden Center in a match that showed off the team’s youth.
No. 9 UCLA (4-2, 0-2 Mountain Pacific Sports Federation) swept Princeton (1-3) with a lineup that featured all four of its freshmen, a redshirt freshman and two sophomores. Coach John Speraw stuck with the same lineup for the match’s entirety, leaving the remaining nine players standing in gray warm-up jackets by the bench.
“I’ve been mixing up lineups, and I put that lineup together yesterday,” Speraw said. “I’m happy with the way they played. Obviously we had a lot of really young guys out there on the floor, so for them to come out there and perform well is really nice for them.”
One of those players was freshman setter Eric Matheis, the lone Bruin without an appearance in the 2015 season, who played every point of Sunday’s match and contributed 32 assists.
“I thought it was a little bit slow at the start of each game, but we definitely got better as the games went,” Matheis said. “We knew the blockers were going with the middle so the game plan was going against the flow – kind of a misdirect offense. I felt like that worked well for us.”
Offensively, the Bruins were almost unstoppable in the first set. The team held a .611 hitting percentage with a single error as it cruised to the opening set victory. While that regressed to a .368 average over the whole match, freshman outside hitter J.T. Hatch ended the night with an errorless .733 percentage.
On the service line, things were sloppy for both teams. UCLA was helped along by 19 service errors committed by Princeton while committing 13 of its own.
“What I like to do is just forget each point and restart after each point, but that’s not always the case,” said freshman opposite Christian Hessenauer. “When they do make errors, I feel like we can always bounce on top of them.”
While none of the three sets were particularly lopsided, UCLA’s only moments of concern came in the third set. The young lineup, however, was able to take advantage of multiple rally-killing service errors that stopped Princeton in its tracks. The Bruins eventually pulled away for the 25-21 win.
Princeton, currently on a three-game California trip, was the final nonconference opponent that UCLA faced this season. The Bruins now head into three months of MPSF play with two home matches this week. Both will feature ranked teams in No. 6 Pepperdine on Tuesday and No. 12 Stanford on Thursday.