MIKE CHIEN Junior outside hitter, Lauren
Fendrick, returns the ball against Pepperdine last
Tuesday.
By Andrew Borders
Daily Bruin Reporter
The last time the No. 8 UCLA women’s volleyball team faced
the Washington schools, the Bruins were 7-2 and looking to put a
couple more matches in the win column against two of the
Pac-10’s traditional doormat teams.
Since then, little has gone right for the Bruins. In the first
match after the Washington trip, UCLA (11-5, 6-4 Pac-10) won the
first two games in the home affair with Stanford and lost the last
three, to start a run in which UCLA has lost four of its last six
matches.
Since then, so much has gone right for Washington State. The
Cougars (13-8, 7-6) have won six of eight since the tilt with the
Bruins in Pullman on Oct. 5.
If the Cougars needed extra motivation for tonight’s 7
p.m. match, they can look to the Pac-10 standings to see that a win
over the Bruins means a move into fifth place in the conference, a
shift that would send the Bruins into sixth, an unfamiliar position
for the UCLA program.
“Washington State is always a good team,” senior
setter Erika Selsor said. “They’ve had a good
reputation even before I got here. We’ve got a lot of work to
do and a big opponent in front of us (tonight).”
“They’ve worked their way up there and shown that
they’re a good solid program,” UCLA head coach Andy
Banachowski added. “We were very on top of our game and fired
up to beat them when we went up there last time because they had
beaten us up there the year before.”
Banachowski is charged with figuring out why the Bruins have
fallen so far so fast, as well as making sure the 2000 upset
doesn’t happen again. He attributes some of the fall off to
the absence of senior outside hitter Kristee Porter, who has missed
the last four matches while the NCAA investigation into her
expense-sharing arrangement continues.
Freshman middle blocker Heather Cullen, who has helped fill the
outside hitter role in Porter’s stead, makes no excuses.
“We just don’t have the right attitude,” she
said. “We need to be happy we’re playing volleyball
here at UCLA.”
In news that will be much more appreciated by the Bruins, Selsor
is 19 assists shy of breaking Ann Boyer’s (’88) school
record for career assists. Selsor, who averages just under 14
assists per game, is on pace to break the record on Saturday
against Washington.
The game against the Huskies (11-11, 4-9) matches UCLA against a
team that has never won a match against any of the current
Bruins.
Then again, none of the current Bruins had ever lost four
conference matches this early in the season.