By Pauline Vu
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
PROVO, Utah “”mdash; Matt Komer, Adam Naeve, Mark Williams and
Rich Nelson walked into the press conference room Saturday night
and found a stats sheet laid out for each of them on the table. As
they waited for the questions to begin, they looked over the
numbers.
Komer’s first question said it all.
“How the hell did we win?”
He laughed a bit before adding, “They beat us in every
category.”
Looking at the statistics, it was a surprise UCLA won. As both
coaches later pointed out, the Bruins were out-hit (.270 hitting
percentage to .253), out-dug (43 to 34), out-blocked (15 to seven),
and out-served (Hawai’i had three aces and only 11 errors,
while UCLA had two aces to 20 errors).
In fact, the Warriors even out-scored the Bruins, tallying a
total of 107 points to UCLA’s 105 (30-27, 30-23, 15-30,
30-27).
Much of UCLA’s statistical downfall was because of the
match’s third game, which the Bruins lost 30-15. It was their
largest losing margin of the year.
“That was an embarrassment,” UCLA Head Coach Al
Scates said.
“It felt supernatural,” sophomore outside hitter
Cameron Mount said of game three. “There wasn’t much we
could do about it.”
Not much besides hope for it to end.
“We knew it could only last so long,” Mount
said.
After the Warriors dropped the first two games there was a
ten-minute TV break. It’s not known what Hawai’i Coach
Mike Wilton said to his team, but Scates guessed, “They did
something in there at halftime. They came out ready to
play.”
Whatever the case, the Hawai’i players came out swinging
and dominated the game, hitting .304. UCLA, plagued by the
Warriors’ blocking as well as its own hitting errors, managed
a -.226 clip.
“The real Warrior team showed up in games three and
four,” Wilton said. “It’s been a trademark of
this team all year long: no matter how dark and gloomy it may look
out on the court, don’t be thinking the match is
over.”
While his team struggled, Scates alternated players, at one
point replacing nearly his whole starting lineup.
Greg Coon came in for Scott Morrow. Ian Burnham came in for
Komer. Jesse Debban came in for Williams. Dan Conners came in for
Nelson.
The backup Bruins didn’t seem to help much. They
couldn’t stop the kills the Warriors rained down on them, or
hit past their blocks.
At the press conference a reporter asked what happened that game
and the Bruins were quick to respond.
Williams: “We got blocked.”
Nelson: “About the first seven blocks were theirs, I
think.”
Komer: “We hit some balls out.”
Naeve: “We hit -.226.”
Game three was a miserable one for UCLA. Don’t question
that.
But in the end the game showed what the Bruins were made of. The
way the players saw it, the game may have been a lost cause, but
there was still a match to be won.
“That could’ve destroyed some teams, losing like
that,” Scates said.
“You’d expect, taking a beating like that,
we’d be really down,” Mount added.
Instead, Mount said, the players were occasionally smiling at
each other, sometimes laughing, throughout the game.
And the backups didn’t fail in their job either. They
provided the rest the starters needed and were the spark heading
into the fourth.
“Good job by Scates, he took us out and got us
rest,” Williams said. “He took away their momentum by
doing that.”
For game four, all of the starters were back in and ready to
play. The game was a back-and-forth struggle, but the Bruins took
it at 30-27, claiming the conference championship and NCAA
automatic berth at the same time.
A few seconds before the press conference started, Nelson, still
a little surprised by the stats, repeated Komer’s
question.
“How did we win?” he asked.
Williams, the team captain, looked at him and asked simply,
“What do you mean, “˜How’?”
Nelson shrugged, then answered nonchalantly, “Well,
besides pure domination.”
Nelson, of course, was joking. As game three showed, UCLA was
nothing in the way of pure domination.
But then again, as the entire match showed, the Bruins
didn’t need to be.