The Bruins will have their first opportunity to face a familiar opponent this week – but it’ll come just two days after their first meeting.
No. 2 UCLA men’s volleyball (6-1, 4-0 Mountain Pacific Sports Federation) will play a home-and-away series against No. 11 UC Santa Barbara (6-1, 3-1) this Wednesday and Friday.
The Bruins played the Gauchos in this back-to-back format last year, along with Brigham Young and Hawai’i. UCLA will do the same with those three teams this season.
The back-to-back nature of these games allows coach John Speraw little time to tinker with his game plan for the Gauchos.
“It’s actually pretty fun when you have these opportunities occur because it does lend itself to some adaptations and changes in tactics. And then how do you respond to that? And it happens really quickly,” Speraw said. “I think it’s going to require a lot of our intellect in order to get the job done.”
UC Santa Barbara finished fifth in last season’s final AVCA coaches poll, but only began this season ranked No. 12.
“We’re going to have to really be ready for a very good team who probably feels like they’re better than a lot of people anticipated,” Speraw said. “We saw them in the fall and they didn’t look that great and now they’re playing good volleyball, so you can tell how well they’re coached and how hard that team is working.”
Speraw said that the Gauchos are a lot like the Bruins in terms of size and personnel, noting that neither team is particularly large but both control the ball well. Beyond that, the two teams have had similar starts to their seasons.
Like UCLA, UC Santa Barbara boasts a record with only one loss – a five-set loss to UC Irvine. Both teams also faced the same two teams last week – USC and Cal Baptist – and each went 2-0.
The Bruins’ four-set win over the Trojans marked their first win that wasn’t a sweep.
“I think that was the first time we’ve really been challenged, other than Ohio State,” said junior outside hitter JT Hatch. “The more times we can be challenged throughout the year, the better we’re going to be at the end of the year.”
Speraw said that he saw areas of weakness in the match against USC, including with the rhythm of sets when the team was out of system in transition.
“We worked a little bit on that today – what tempo, speed of a set are we running and how are the hitters communicating that to the setter and what kind of ball are we giving them,” Speraw said. “There was some miscommunication on that versus ‘SC, so just trying to get everyone on the same page.”
Sophomore setter and opposite Micah Ma’a says that a main emphasis this week has been improving the setter-hitter connection.
“With a 6-2 it’s difficult because you get half the reps with the setters. I set half the time, (freshman setter Hagen Smith) sets half the time, so getting a lot of volume is difficult,” Ma’a said. “If we can just take care of the volume that we do get, we can improve.”