NICOLE MILLER/Daily Bruin Sophomore quick hitter
Scott Morrow smashes the ball over the arms of his
Hawai’i opponents in a match last week. UCLA d.
UCSD 26-30, 30-26, 30-22, 30-18
By Amanda Fletcher
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
UCLA men’s volleyball Head Coach Al Scates has said all
along that UC San Diego can beat any team in the Mountain Pacific
Sports Federation. Fortunately for the Bruins, they weren’t
the first.
The Tritons proved Scates partly right, though, taking the first
game off the Bruins in UCLA’s 26-30, 30-26, 30-22, 30-18 win
Friday night.
Division III NCAA champions last year, the Tritons moved up to
Division II this year but compete in the MPSF with Division I
teams. Throughout the season, they haven’t won a single
league match, but have been able to take games off No. 6
Pepperdine, No. 5 Stanford, and now No. 3 UCLA.
“They can beat any team they play, but they just
can’t sustain a high level through the whole match,”
Scates said. “We just got better as the evening progressed,
and in the end, we were dominating them.”
In game one, the Tritons’ (4-20, 0-16) highly-touted
defense put them on top early in the match and had senior opposite
hitter Donald Chen on his way to a match-high 19 kills.
Aiding UCSD in its attack was senior outside hitter Zack Hite,
who added 12 kills, while junior outside hitter Griffin Cogorno had
11 kills and 10 digs.
“They’re a good team,” senior outside hitter
Mark Williams said. “They came out strong, and we
didn’t come out as strong as we should have. We had to start
digging more balls. Once we started digging more balls, we could
score more points.”
After they took control of the game with their passing, the
Bruins spread their attack across the net with four out of six
players hitting double-digit kills, giving the team a .424 clip for
the match.
Senior middle blocker Adam Naeve (.536) and sophomore outside
hitter Cameron Mount (.464) led the team, hitting 17 kills each.
Junior outside hitter Matt Komer added 15 while freshman middle
blocker Scott Morrow recorded 12 kills and six blocks.
But it was UCLA’s general improvement that allowed them to
cruise to a victory.
While the Tritons out-dug the Bruins three to one in the first
game, according to Scates, the Bruins ended with 38 digs to
UCSD’s 40.
Mount and Williams steadied the Bruin defense with 11 digs each
while freshman libero Adam Shrader added nine.
On the serving end, the Bruins stepped it up a notch, putting
away 13 aces to their 15 errors with Williams and Naeve recording
four aces each.
Overall, Naeve was the man of the night, adding two solo blocks
and six block assists to his team-leading number of kills and
aces.
“They couldn’t have beaten us, but they sure played
a good first game,” Scates said.