For a UCLA team playing some of its best volleyball of the 2015 season, Saturday night was something of a letdown.
No. 8-seed UCLA (13-14, 9-13 Mountain Pacific Sports Federation), already guaranteed to have a challenge on its hands in No. 1-seed UC Irvine (26-4, 19-3), fell flat in its season finale, dropping out of the MPSF tournament in a 3-0 sweep.
“I’m certainly disappointed that we didn’t play a better volleyball match,” said coach John Speraw. “It felt like we made some really nice strides over the past few weeks and I thought (we) had one of our better matches of the season in our last match against Stanford, so it felt like we were in a good place going into tonight. We just didn’t play very well.”
The Anteaters had a lot to do with that, stifling every Bruin attempt to mount a comeback in Irvine.
The hosts held wire-to-wire victories in the first and third sets, hitting over .500 in both compared to hitting percentages .200 and below for UCLA. While the Bruins fought back and briefly took a lead in the second set, the Anteaters used a 10-2 run midway through to secure the win in that set, too.
UCLA’s offense was led by MPSF Freshman of the Year J.T. Hatch. The outside hitter led UCLA in kills, but didn’t receive much help otherwise. Hatch’s 13 kills accounted for almost half the team’s total, and the Bruins committed 14 errors collectively, losing the three sets 17-25, 18-25, 15-25. That effort was no match for the nation’s best offensive team standing on the other side of the net.
“They were playing at a real high level offensively,” said freshman setter Eric Matheis. “They had something like three total hitting errors on the night and they brought it offensively. We didn’t really have a response.”
Even when they weren’t on the attack, the Anteaters put up a blocking front that garnered 12 block assists compared to just two for the Bruins, their lowest total of the season. It was complete lockdown – much like many of UCLA’s experiences have been this season.
In the three matches between these teams in 2015, UCLA only managed to win one set while nine went to Irvine.
“All I can take away from tonight’s match, really, is that we have to keep continuing on the path that I think we’ve been on over the course of the season,” Speraw said. “It’s apparent that they were more physical and more skilled in just about every facet of the game.”
Beating an elite playoff team like Irvine and advancing past the first round of MPSFs are now the challenges that UCLA will have a year to prepare for.
“Those (big wins) come with experience. Now that we’ve been where we’ve been with a young team in a playoff game – knowing how the atmosphere is – we have a little bit of that experience,” said sophomore middle blocker Mitch Stahl. “It’s just going to come down to how resilient we can be in pressure moments, making plays, (and) knowing that when we get to the postseason we’ve put in the work we need to in order to win.”