UC Santa Barbara men's volleyball team rolls, will meet University of Hawaii for fourth time
May 5—COLUMBUS, Ohio — This season's fourth meeting between the Hawaii and UC Santa Barbara men's volleyball teams will come about two weeks later than expected and on a bigger stage.
The Rainbow Warriors swept a three-match series with the Gauchos in Isla Vista, Calif., in mid-March, and an anticipated rematch in the Big West tournament in late April evaporated with UH's stunning loss in the semifinals.
While UCSB went on to claim the Big West's automatic bid into the NCAA tournament, Hawaii's undefeated regular season kept the Warriors on the top line of the NCAA tournament bracket, sending the Warriors directly into the national semifinals as an at-large selection.
So with the Hawaii coaches looking on from the upper level of the Covelli Center after the Warriors' first practice in Ohio, UC Santa Barbara set up the 91st all-time meeting between the programs with a four-set win over Pepperdine in an opening-round match on Tuesday.
The Rainbow Warriors (15-1 ) and Gauchos (16-4 ) will add the next chapter in the series on the Ohio State campus at 11 a.m. Thursday when they meet for a spot in Saturday's national championship match. The semifinal matches will be streamed on ncaa.com.
"I'm really excited. My teammates, the bigger the moment, the more I trust them to step up, " UCSB senior Roy McFarland said after the Gauchos' 25-23, 25-22, 22-25, 28-26 win over Pepperdine.
"We (faced Hawaii ) three times in the beginning of the season, they gave us a little bit of a wake-up call, we've been grinding throughout the whole season and really excited to get another shot."
Hawaii holds a 53-37 advantage in the series and has won the past 10 meetings, the last three coming in the early-season series on March 11-13 in the Thunderdome.
UCSB took the first set of the series and UH ran off the next nine to end the road trip. Both teams have lost just once since that weekend, with UCSB extending its winning streak to 11 with Tuesday's win over Pepperdine.
"We definitely are a better team than then, " said UCSB coach Rick McLaughlin, who was named the USMC /AVCA National Coach of the Year for the second straight season earlier on Tuesday.
"We were coming off maybe two weeks of practice when we played them. But they're a better team too. It's the exact same thing. We're going to have to up our level and our guys know that and they've been upping their level when they've needed to for the last half of the season."
Like Hawaii, UC Santa Barbara is powered by a senior class that returned for a run at a title after a promising start to 2020 was shut down with the Warriors at 15-1 and the Gauchos at 14-2.
The UCSB senior class was again at the forefront on Tuesday, with McFarland and Randy DeWeese hammering 21 kills each. Senior setter Casey McGarry finished with 59 assists and put down two kills, the second coming on match point to finally finish off the Waves, the MPSF tournament runner-up.
DeWeese put away 12 of his first 14 attempts before his first error of the match close to midway through the second set and finished the match hitting.340. The 6-foot-6 opposite also fired three aces and came up with 13 digs.
Sophomore Ryan Wilcox, a Punahou graduate, contributed 11 kills while hitting.333 and two aces.
UCSB had five aces against 20 service errors vs. Pepperdine, but McLaughlin said the Gauchos will need to continue to be aggressive from the service line against UH.
"We have to serve tough, " McLaughlin said. "You could see San Diego was able to get Hawaii into a little bit of passing trouble. If you can do that, then you've got a chance definitely. Our guys will be ready to serve aggressively and confidently, and I think we'll do a better job this time."
Lewis 3, Penn State 0 The Flyers' All-America duo of Tyler Mitchem and Ryan Coenen combined for 26 kills and Lewis advanced into a semifinal match against No. 2 seed BYU on Thursday with a 25-23, 27-25, 25-20 sweep of the Nittany Lions.
Mitchem put away 14 kills in 20 attempts and had five blocks and fellow middle blocker T.J. Murray added seven kills in 10 attempts and three blocks, with neither committing a hitting error. Coenen finished with 12 kills on 27 attempts for the Flyers, who hit.460 as a team. Along with his 37 assists, setter Kevin Kauling had 10 digs and was in on six blocks for the MIVA champion Flyers.
