EDWARD LIN/Daily Bruin UCLA sophomore outside hitter
Cameron Mount spikes the ball against a Long Beach
player at the MPSF semifinals in Provo, Utah.
By Pauline Vu
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
PROVO, UTAH “”mdash; Junior outside hitter Matt Komer
doesn’t say much, but when he wants to make a statement, you
definitely hear it.
Thursday night, you heard it in the loud smacks of his kills.
You even heard it when, frustrated at the Bruins’ 3-0 deficit
in game four, he punched the ball so hard it flew into the
stands.
In No. 3 seed UCLA’s Mountain Pacific Sports Federation
semifinal match against No. 2 seed Long Beach State, Komer had a
team-high 22 kills at a .514 hitting percentage. Komer entered the
match midway through the first game to push the Bruins (22-7) to a
27-30, 30-25, 30-24, 23-30, 15-7 victory. The team advances to
Saturday’s MPSF finals against Hawai’i.
“Matt Komer ignited us,” UCLA Head Coach Al Scates
said.
And Komer didn’t even start the match. Scates put junior
Ian Burnham in because, he said, the last time the Bruins played
the Beach, Burnham had a .300 hitting percentage while Komer hit
.000.
That wasn’t the case tonight. From the minute he walked on
the court Komer was unstoppable. He put away all 10 of his first
sets with no errors for a perfect 1.000 clip.
“I came out swinging,” Komer said. “I just
came out on fire, tried and hit as hard as I could.”
The Bruins narrowly dropped the first game before taking the
next two by more comfortable margins. But in game four the 49ers
turned the tide, putting up more blocks and hitting through more of
the Bruins’.
The Beach had the momentum going into the fifth, but they
didn’t keep it. A 49er kill gone long gave UCLA the 4-3 lead,
which the Bruins built upon until they had the game at 15-7 and the
match at 3-2.
In the postgame press conference, a reporter asked Scates, who
has won an NCAA-record 18 national championships, if the playoff
games ever get old to him.
“Are you kidding?” Scates said. “My blood
pressure’s about 180 over 90. This isn’t old, this is
stimulating.”
The Bruins beat two things: the high altitude of BYU’s
Smith Fieldhouse and Long Beach-gunner Dave McKienzie.
UCLA managed six aces against only 15 errors. That’s not
bad considering the last time the Bruins played at BYU, where the
altitude causes the ball to fly farther than it would on sea level,
they had one ace and 19 errors ““ the worst serving percentage
in UCLA men’s volleyball history.
UCLA also managed to contain Long Beach’s biggest scoring
threat, senior opposite hitter Dave McKienzie.
McKienzie, who leads the nation this season averaging 40 kills a
match, led Thursday’s match with 26 kills, but at only a .217
clip.
“We knew we had to stop McKienzie,” Williams
said.”We had to slow him down or our chances of winning were
slim.”
The Beach played well Thursday night, but playoffs rarely
provide second chances, and the 49ers are out.
But the Bruins don’t mind a bit. Senior outside hitter
Mark Williams said that a huge motivation for UCLA coming into the
match was knowing they’d could be the ones to end the careers
of the 49er seniors.
“We don’t like them. They’re just arrogant,
the way they play. It helped knowing we could end their careers
without any rings,” he said. “I can’t say how
strongly we felt about that.”
The 49ers took little solace in the fact they made it to the
MPSF semifinals.
When asked if he thought it had been a successful year,
McKienzie replied with a tight, disgusted look on his face.
“Yeah, it’s a successful year, but we didn’t
get the goal we were hoping for.” He shrugged.
“It’s all right.”
Long Beach flies back to Southern California today, three games
short of ending the season the way they’d like.
UCLA, meanwhile, looks to Saturday’s game as another step
toward ending the season the way they expect.