The Bruins travelled west of campus to their old stomping grounds at the Annenberg Community Beach House in Santa Monica on Sunday for the Pac-12 Invitational, but any chance of a happy homecoming was gone with the wind.
Instead No. 8 UCLA (9-4) was forced to play its three matchups in the unfamiliar conditions of what used to be the team’s home court and ended the invitational with an overall 1-2 record.
“We’ve been having a great season and really been on the upswing, and proving ourselves as a young squad,” said coach Stein Metzger. “This weekend was a bit of a setback.”
After coming off a 3-2 loss to No. 6 Long Beach State on Wednesday, UCLA would end its next game with another 3-2 defeat, this time suffering an upset by No. 10 Arizona.
The Bruins’ five teams ended phase one of the competition hitting for a combined .287, while the Wildcats (15-3) managed to overpower the Bruins by hitting .375.
In the second matchup of the day, UCLA managed to improve on its performance in the first outing, boosting the team’s hitting to a .408, to overpower Cal’s .242, en route to a 5-0 victory over the Golden Bears (7-14).
By the third game, UCLA was starting to feel the effects of spending several hours under the hot sun, said fifth-year senior Madie Smith. The fatigue forced Smith and freshman Elise Zappia to only hit for .208 compared to the .439 of their Sun Devils (7-12) counterparts Jordy Checkal and Bethany Jorgensen.
“We were on our third game, and Elise and I were pretty much dead,” Smith said. “(Sunday) we played them first and we beat them pretty well, so I think it has more to do with energy than hitting percentage.”
But ultimately it was the windy conditions that had a say in UCLA’s matchup against ASU. Junior Kamila Tan said it was the wind that ended up being the deciding factor when she and her partner, senior Zoë Nightingale, were faced in close matches. Tan and Nightingale played a three-set thriller with Arizona State’s No. 1 doubles team, losing the final set 17-15, where even a single point could have given UCLA the 3-2 victory instead of the loss to ASU.
“You can be on the good side where the wind is coming towards you, or the bad side where the wind is coming at your back. It’s a lot easier to defend on the good side,” Tan said. “Just the way that the points were and the times we switched, we ended up on the bad side and it was really hard for us to side out.”
The Bruins began the season with the advantage of an on-campus practice facility in Sunset Canyon Recreation Center, eliminating the need to travel the 10 miles to the Annenberg Community Beach House.
But practicing on courts surrounded by a shroud of trees that doubled as windshields created a vacuum where playing in the wind would become a more and more distant memory for UCLA.
Now, the Bruins are making changes to get reacquainted with the wind once more.
“We haven’t been down there playing in the wind for quite a while,” Metzger said. “That’s something moving forward we will do more of – get down there and get down on the afternoon when it tends to be more windy, the same kind of conditions that we played in today.”