It seems early in the season to stage a battle of No. 1 vs. No. 2, but nonetheless on the first weekend of conference play UCI took on BYU twice at home over the weekend. The BYU men came down to Irvine with every intention of returning to Provo with the No. 1 ranking firmly in hand. After losing the top ranking to UCI in a pre-season tournament loss last week, the Cougars clearly came for revenge and they got it.
In the end, the Cougars bested Irvine in both matches and re-claimed the No. 1 spot. While they made it look easy on night one, winning in three sets and hitting .494 as a team doing it, UCI turned up the heat on night two and made the Cougars work for it.
The atmosphere in the Bren Center felt more like a late April playoff match than a season opener. The line at the ticket booth outside gave fans just a hint of what they’d find when they made their way to their seats. Crowds neared 3,000 on both nights and the energy in the arena was high throughout. UCI students had their chests painted and BYU supporters held their homemade signs. Truth be told, there were more BYU fans in attendance than UCI fans, but both made their presence known during what turned out to be a back and forth battle worthy of the top two seeds in the country right now.
UCI opened the second match in the same way they did the first, by losing the first two sets. BYU’s block was on fire early and the UCI hitters were struggling to get anything going. All-American Carson Clark was having a particularly tough time getting anything past the wall of BYU blockers and Head Coach John Speraw took him out of the match in the second set. Clark was replaced by Zach La Cavera and never returned to the line up.
Though La Cavera saw no action at all in the first match, the 6’4” freshman from Huntington Beach came out swinging when he got his opportunity and finished with a team-high 10 kills, a team-high four aces and two blocks to get the Anteaters back in the match. Speraw made good use of his bench as 14 players received significant court time.
Behind the play of La Cavera, UCI was able to win the second two sets and force a fifth set. But BYU was not finished. The Cougars took an early 5-2 lead and never looked back, winning the fifth set 15-9.
Most encouraging was how well both teams used the middle hitters. The quick set to UCI middles Scott Kevorken and Austin D’Amore resulted in nine kills for Kevorken and five for Amore who hit .643 and .500 respectively. Not to be outdone, BYU’s Russ Lavaja hit .538 with seven kills in 13 attempts. It's about time the middles got back into the game and shed their decoy status.
These two teams won’t see each other again until the MPSF Conference tournament at the end of April. Though it is way too early in the season to say, watching the match did feel as if one was watching the two best teams in the country fight it out. Elsewhere in the MPSF, we have yet to see real challenges for Stanford, UCLA or USC, but we now know that both BYU and UCI are playing very solid and complete volleyball for this stage of the season. The coming weeks will tell us if any of the other MPSF top teams have what it takes to knock either of these powerhouses off. If anyone comes close, we’re in for quite a men’s volleyball season in 2012.
