The Mountain Pacific Sports Federation standings got a makeover this past week after back-to-back matches between the No. 9 Bruins and their conference rival No. 1 Brigham Young Cougars.
After dropping the first match Thursday night in straight games, 30-25, 30-27, 30-27, the Bruins pulled out a four-game victory, 30-28, 23-30, 30-23, 30-21.
Assistant coach Brian Rofer explained the win over BYU is not much of an upset for either team.
“We have the potential to beat anybody as anybody in this league could be anybody else,” Rofer said.
The Bruins handed BYU only their second loss of the season as the Cougars dropped to 12-2 in the MPSF. BYU is now in a tie for first place with Long Beach State.
This creates an interesting situation for the conference as BYU plays Long Beach State next week, and the 49ers have the chance to dethrone the Cougars from the top spot they have held comfortably almost all season long.
The Bruins, now in a tie for fourth with Stanford, have only four matches left against top-10 teams, compared to Stanford’s five.
A good part of the turnaround from Thursday to Friday was the Bruins’ confidence.
“For the first time all year, everyone was saying, “˜Give me the ball, I wanna hit this ball,’ and when you have that kind of confidence, we could beat anybody,” junior Sean O’Malley said.
The Bruins’ confidence showed up mostly in the fourth game Friday night. Emotions ran high in Pauley Pavilion with the number of Cougar supporters almost equaling the number of Bruin fans.
But the Cougar fans, including the very vocal BYU reserve outside hitter Mat Taylor, quieted down by the fourth game as the Bruins shut down the Cougars’ offense, holding them to a -.057 clip, indicating the Cougars hit more errors than kills.
“You could see it in their eyes ““ they just lost faith in themselves, and we just stuck it to them, kept beating them down,” O’Malley said.
Redshirt junior quick hitter Jamie Diefenbach, who sat out most of Thursday night’s match, started the third and fourth games on Friday.
Though he wasn’t much of a factor in the third game, Diefenbach was perfect from the net in the fourth game, recording three kills on as many attacks and adding three blocks.
Also playing a major role was the setting of sophomore Kevin Ker. Ker came in about halfway through the second game for a struggling Matt Wade. Though Ker was not able to get the Bruins back from a 10-17 deficit, he improved the sideout ratio. Ker finished the game with 39 set assists to help propel the Bruin attack to a .552 clip in the third game and .375 clip in the fourth.
The Bruins’ strong play late showed their ability to close out matches.
“That’s what we want to see in the latter part of the season, where our guys are starting to want to close out in the end,” Rofer said. “We got to see more and more of that.”
The ability to close out matches late was lacking Thursday night as the Bruins dropped early leads in the second and third games to be swept for the third time this season.
In the first game, neither team could find a groove with both teams hitting below .200.
In the second game, the Bruins seemed to have breathed new life into their game. They built an early lead and sophomore outside hitter Garrett Muagututia even used his face as set. The Cougars pulled away late to win the second game.
The third game was no different, with the Bruins losing an early lead to bad, late-game hitting.
Only O’Malley recorded double-digit kills, and the Bruins were their own worst enemy with 19 service errors to the Cougars’ eight. Senior libero Tony Ker, the all-time leader in digs for UCLA, was dig-less in the first two games and recorded only two digs in the third game.
Likely frustrated at his team’s inability to close out games, coach Al Scates called a team meeting immediately after the loss.