Wednesday, May 1, 1996

Childhood friends see long road culminate with NCAA's in PauleyBy Ruben Gutierrez

Daily Bruin Staff

It is 1986 on a hot summer day in Honolulu. Two young teenage buddies, who have known each other since the fifth grade, decide to go to the beach together to do some surfing. Carefree in their youth, the boys play volleyball into the evening, just as they did the day before and the day after.

It is 1996, on the home court of volleyball titan UCLA, the first round of the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation playoffs. With the players taking their positions to receive the serve, the swing hitter looks smaller than everyone else, even the setter.

With the serve rapidly approaching, the swing expertly passes the ball to the setter, the best player in the conference.

The setter has done this thousands of times before. With a fiercely competitive glint in his eye, the setter simultaneously extends his wrists and barks out orders.

"Get up, Wells!" the leader yells to the attacker.

On cue, the smaller man explodes, suddenly not looking so small, thanks to his 40 inch vertical leap. He gets up, over the net and sends one down the line for another kill.

Afterwards, the two teammates slap hands and it all looks strangely familiar. It should. The setter, Stein Metzger and the swing hitter, Brian Wells, have been at this together for awhile.

"Where we played club at, the Outrigger Canoe Club, there were three courts: two full courts and a baby court where all the little kids would play," Metzger said. "Every day, we'd go and surf for a couple of hours, then come in and play volleyball for a few hours, then go surf ..."

"Seven days a week," adds Wells.

When they were ready to enter high school in volleyball-crazed Hawaii, naturally, the two attended Punahou and in doing so entered the school's storied program.

"Supposedly, there is a statistic that more players in the MPSF have come out of that program than any other program, than any other high school, any California high school or anything," Metzger said. "That's what our coaches used to tell us."

At Punahou, the two acquired an unparalleled volleyball education under head coach Peter Balding. The former Pepperdine star tirelessly drilled his players with fundamentals and more fundamentals. Though it seemed monotonous at the time, the work on the basics paid huge dividends. Punahou won its 11th straight state title during Metzger's and Wells' senior year.

"In retrospect, I think we were really lucky to be coached by who were, Peter Balding," Wells said. "Their work ethic and the way they coached were so far different from UCLA. Regardless of the skills you learned, they taught the fundamentals and how to work as a team with teammates. I might have bitched then, but now I consider myself really lucky to have been coached by them."

The news that Punahou was a prep powerhouse in the sport was no secret to UCLA head coach Al Scates, who had been mining the talent-rich school for years. Among the first of the Hawaiian transplants, Scates brought Bruin great Peter Ehrman to the mainland from Punahou. More recently, Punahou alum Kevin Wong, a high school teammate of Wells and Metzger, started on two UCLA national championship squads.

The latest Punahou heist has worked out superbly for UCLA this season. Metzger became the UCLA career assists leader, despite sitting behind All-American Mike Sealy his first two seasons en route to being selected Mountain Pacific Sports Federation Player of the Year. Wells, on the other hand, was a regular starter for the Bruins for the first time in his five-year stint here.

According to many volleyball insiders, Metzger may be the best player in the country, let alone the best setter, and he is the main reason the Bruins are in a position to win their record 16th NCAA title.

"He's great," Long Beach State head coach Ray Ratelle said. "He's the reason they are where they're at right now. I don't think there is any other setter in the country that could've done what Stein did for UCLA."

According to Scates, Metzger sets the table for the Bruins with his great all-around skills. Besides possessing excellent set selection and ball placement, Metzger is also a threat as a blocker and an attacker at the net. Scates loosely compares his all-around ability to Karch Kiraly, arguably the most accomplished spiker to don a UCLA jersey.

Despite all his talent, the driving force behind Metzger's success has and always will be his sharply honed competitive nature which was shaped by his father, Bill.

"He played basketball at the University of Virginia and I grew up playing basketball with him in the park," Metzger said. "He would never let me win. He'd let me get close to make it kind of competitive, but at the end, he'd be almost a dirty player and I would not win because he had to win every time."

"Ever since then, I've played to win," he continued. "There was always that feeling that winning was what made sports fun and even if you didn't win, striving to win and playing aggressively was succeeding."

Given all this abundant and varied talent, along with his win-at-all costs attitude, it would be hard to imagine a more valuable commodity he could offer. He exceeds himself again, however, with his leadership.

"I think from a setting standpoint, he's the best setter in the league, but from a leadership standpoint, he might be the best leader in the league," said Cal State Northridge head coach John Price. "That is something that is desperately lacking at a lot of programs, including ours."

Wells, another fifth-year senior, also furnishes UCLA with a veteran leader. The road to success has often been bumpier for Wells than it was for Metzger. Coming to UCLA as a six-foot, one-inch swing hitter, Wells' prospects for immediate playing time were bleak and he waited four years for a shot at significant court time.

In his first season as a starter, Wells has performed better than expected, most recently at the MPSF Tournament last weekend.

"God, he played great, too," Ratelle said. "Brian has played well for them all year long. He jumps great and he's got great quickness. He does a lot of things for them."

While the jaws opposing coaches and players fall when they see the swing hitter rise, Metzger knew about Wells' ups when they were still kids skateboarding, pulling ollies off of a launch ramp in Honolulu.

"In fifth or sixth grade, we made this ramp outside in my front yard and we'd come flying down the hill on our skateboards and we'd hit the ramp," he explained. "That's where Brian first got his nickname, 'Superfly Bri-Bri.' Brian would be out getting twice as high as anybody else. That's when we first saw that he was going to be an incredible athlete."

Wells' strong suit lies in his passing. That skill is another outgrowth of the rigorous drills at Punahou, where coaches would spend up to an hour serving balls at players to improve their passes.

As Metzger puts it, Wells "passes nails" and opposing teams do anything in their power to keep him from receiving their serve.

"He moves the ball around real well," Ratelle said. "His big thing, of course, is passing. That means nobody is going to serve him, they serve the other players whenever possible, but he takes just as many balls as he can get his hands on."

Metzger and Wells will be playing in the NCAA Championships on their home floor as the top seeds while the team from their home state of Hawaii, against whom they have fought three pitched battles this season, is seeded second

The stage is set for a fairy tale ending, but if you ask the two boyhood friends, they knew, somehow, things might work out his way.

"I think it was destiny that we were thrown together for all these years," Metzger says.

"It had to be," agrees Wells.

ANDREW SCHOLER/Daily Bruin

Stein Metzger

ANDREW SCHOLER/Daily Bruin

Brian Wells