BYU men's volleyball – Turning a loss into a win at UC Irvine

Fans of the top-ranked BYU men’s volleyball team may have thought the Cougars fell Friday night at No. 6 UC Irvine. Others are pretty certain the Cougars remain undefeated after downing the defending NCAA champion Anteaters.
Who’s right?
To quote radio commentator Paul Harvey, here is “the rest of the story.”
Many followers – including BYU’s sports information officials, the Deseret Morning News and other media outlets – were following real-time BYU-UCI game action via GameTracker results as posted online by UC Irvine. BYU won the first and third game, lost the second and fourth game – the Cougars were ahead 28-25 in the fourth and needed just two points to close out the game and match, but the Anteaters claimed five straight points to win the fourth and force the deciding fifth game.
And what a fifth game it was.
The fifth game goes to the first team to 15 points – but with a two-point advantage. The Cougars at one point lead 9-5, seemingly in control, and then soon trailed 11-10 before reeling off four straight points for a 14-11 advantage and several shots at match point.
The Cougars once again struggled to finish off the Anteaters, missing on four straight chances at match point: 14-11, 14-12, 14-13 and 15-14. Then came the back-and-forth extended battle, with UCI seeming to take most of the one-point advantages and serving for the match and BYU fighting for survival.
In the end, the GameTracker showed UCI winning the fifth game 28-26 – almost as many points as a regular Game 1 through 4. BYU’s sports information department and the Deseret News and others started filing reports about BYU suffering its first league and overall loss of the season.
But wait – a UC Irvine sports information worker called a BYU counterpart to say GameTracker had malfunctioned … and that the Cougars had actually won the fifth game by the 28-26 score and that BYU senior outside hitter Ivan Perez had put away the final three points for the match-winning victory.
For the record, BYU won 30-28, 32-34, 30-22, 28-30, 28-26.
With that info, the same outlets – BYU and the Deseret News included – had to scramble and correct previous filings, some of which had already gone online. Since the match was on the West Coast with an 8 p.m. MT starting time and went to a very extended five games, local newspapers were pushing deadline to get a story in the next day’s editions – even before the loss-win fiasco.
At the Deseret News, we had written a story about the BYU “loss,” laid out the copy and headline on the electronic page and had typset the page, sending it on to the backshop to make a metal plate for the printing presses. We were alerted with just enough time to call off the backshop, rewrite the headline and text and send a new page to have a correct story throughout our editions (although some of the early editions may show the quick-read “inset score” as UCI beating BYU 3 games to 2 – that was corrected for later editions).
So, that’s how the BYU men’s volleyball team – and the media – turned an apparent Cougar loss into a surprising victory at UC Irvine Friday night.
QUICK NOTES: BYU and UCI play again tonight (Saturday) … BYU leads the Mountain Pacific as the league’s only undefeated team, thanks to Pepperdine upsetting No. 3 and previous league leader Long Beach State earlier this week … Another upset of note: struggling Hawaii upset No. 4 UCLA Thursday night in Honolulu, but the Bruins came back to win the rematch Friday night.