Brad Keller stood above the fray at volleyball practice Wednesday morning in Pauley Pavilion. Standing 10 feet tall on a ball cannon, the assistant coach aimed and fired volleyballs at freshmen Jake Arnitz and J.T. Hatch and sophomore Michael Fisher.
Balls flew across the court at high speed as the outside hitters tried to field them.
“Yes!” Keller yelled as a ball would bounce correctly off their outstretched arms.
“No!” He cried when balls ricocheted in the wrong direction.
The unconventional training technique looked to prepare the No. 12 Bruins (13-13, 9-13 Mountain Pacific Sports Federation) for the weekend’s upcoming challenge: taking on the No. 2 UC Irvine Anteaters (25-4, 19-3 MPSF) in the first round of the MPSF tournament.
“The biggest thing you have to do against Irvine is pass their serves. … It’s going to be a real challenge for us,” said coach John Speraw. “So we spent a lot of time on passing fundamentals and getting hard-driven jump serves, and hopefully we’ll be a little bit more prepared than last time.”
Hatch said that UCLA will need to pass and serve well if it hopes to hang with one of the nation’s best teams, which was the focus of practice leading up to the quarterfinal.
“I’m just hoping we had a good week of practice, getting ready just so we can come out and play hard and compete,” Hatch said.
When the Bruins enter the MPSF postseason tournament this weekend, they appear as a much different team than the one that entered the conference season three and a half months ago.
UCLA struggled to reach .500 all season, failing to compete with higher-ranked opponents – a struggle that has become a theme of the Bruins’ season. For the majority of the season, UCLA has started four freshmen, an unprecedented feat for the program’s recent history.
“It must be decades since the last time UCLA had that many freshmen on the volleyball court. For us to have continued to play over the course of the season, not get discouraged, continue to work hard every day no matter what our record was, I think they deserve a lot of credit for that,” Speraw said. “We’re in a position now where they’ve learned a lot and hopefully they can go out and execute a couple of those lessons.”
In the win-or-go-home playoffs, when the Bruins take to the floor this Saturday in Irvine, it may be the last game of the freshmen’s rookie season and UCLA’s last game with redshirt junior middle blocker Trent Kersten and redshirt senior opposite Clayton Paullin, a fact that Arnitz said is surreal to think about.
With that in mind, the Bruins have nothing to lose against the Anteaters this weekend, a team that UCLA has lost against twice this season by scores of 3-0 and 3-1. Arnitz had a clear idea of what he would contribute to the Bruins’ playoff effort.
“Everything. Don’t be in doubt,” Arnitz said. “If that’s our last game, then I don’t want to come out and be like, ‘Dang, I could have done something different.’ Leave it all on the court.”