Men's volleyball: BYU's title chase has UC Irvine connections

The road to the NCAA men’s volleyball championship for top-ranked BYU this week goes through UC Irvine – in more ways than the Cougars just taking their first ’08 shots at the defending national champion Anteaters in a pair of road matches this weekend.
In fact, there’s a lot of championship-caliber connections with UCI.
First, the previously stated fact that Irvine won the 2007 national title – an honor the Anteaters retain until a new champion is crowned at the 2008 NCAA Final Four in early May.
Second, guess who’s hosting the ’08 Final Four? That’s right – Irvine.
Third, guess who ended the Cougars’ 2007 season in the semifinals of the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation Tournament? Right again – Irvine. After ousting the Cougars, UCI went on to win both the MPSF and NCAA tournament titles.
Irvine is one of two teams – Pepperdine is the other – who has had BYU’s number the past two seasons. The Cougars have gone 1-4 combined against UCI in 2006 and 2007 – and 0-4 vs. Pepperdine during the same two-year stretch.
Two years ago, BYU lost both regular-season matches at Irvine; last year, BYU broke into the No. 1 ranking just before facing UCI. The Cougars took on then-No. 2 UCI in front of a beyond-capacity Smith Fieldhouse crowd of more than 5,800, with the Cougars sweeping the Anteaters in three games. UCI returned the favor the following night in front of another standing-room-only crowd to down BYU in five games, starting BYU on a four-loss skid. Then came the BYU loss to Irvine in the MPSF semifinals.
One more UC Irvine championship note – one after which the Cougars wouldn’t mind patterning themselves.
Two years ago, a talented UCI squad was projected as the preseason favorite to win the ’06 NCAA crown, and the Anteaters waltzed through the regular season as the week-after-week No. 1 team and the top seed in the ’06 Final Four. But the Anteaters were ambushed in the NCAA semis by Penn State, with UCLA beating Penn State in the finals to win the national title.
UCI followed up the ’06 disappointment with last year’s experienced, senior-dominated team that started the ’07 season off as the preseason No. 1. Irvine suffered a couple of early and mid-season slips and watched BYU and then Pepperdine take turns at the top spot in the rankings – the Waves for essentially the second half of the regular season. The Anteaters stayed close and on course, eventually beating BYU in the MPSF Tournament semifinals, upsetting top-seeded and tourney host Pepperdine in the finals for UCI’s first-ever MSPF title and then on to claim the NCAA championship.
By comparison, BYU last season had a talented squad (featuring Perez, Perez, Cala, Holmes and Co.) that had national-title aspirations and even grabbed the No. 1 ranking for a few weeks and spent nearly all of the season among the nation’s top 3. But the Cougars couldn’t get past Pepperdine in the regular season, split with UCI in the two regular-season matches and then came up short against the senior-laden postseason buzzsaw called the Anteaters.
This year, BYU returns a senior-heavy starting lineup (Ivan Perez, Russell Holmes, Trent Sorensen, Jonathan Charette and Brian Congelliere), receiving the preseason No. 1 ranking. There may be some slip-ups along the way in BYU’s regular season, since the Cougars play many of the tough teams on the road (UC Irvine, UCLA, Long Beach State, Hawaii). But if BYU can remain at or near the top and peak going into the postseason like UCI did last year, similar MPSF and NCAA championship fortunes could await the Cougars in late April and early May.