PROVO, Utah — At home, on the road, and now, even on a neutral court perched high up in the Rocky Mountains, it just didn’t matter.
UCLA simply can’t beat Long Beach State – anywhere, anytime, anymore.
The No. 3-seeded Bruins were swept by the No. 2-seeded 49ers for the third time this season in the semifinals of the MPSF Tournament on Thursday night.
The 30-25, 30-27, 30-28 loss ended the Bruins’ season, but that wasn’t even the worst of it for UCLA, which for the first time in school history will now have gone four consecutive years without winning an NCAA championship.
“It says that other programs have been better than ours in the past four years, said Scates, who has won an NCAA-record 18 titles. “But we’re coming back.”
UCLA (24-6) was essentially just one win away from clinching at least an at-large berth into the NCAA Tournament after top-seeded BYU beat No. 4-seeded Pepperdine 30-27, 27-30, 30-27, 24-30, 15-12 earlier in the evening.
Now the Bruins have as good of a chance at getting that at-large bid as Scates does sponsoring an overseas recruiting trip.
Smith Fieldhouse was not kind to Scates, who had scattered boos sprinkled down on him from the rafters during pre-game introductions due to prior comments he had made about BYU’s foreign players. Then again, UCLA hasn’t taken a match in the building since winning its last MPSF Tournament in 2001.
The high altitude makes the site a place where UCLA serves go long and hopes of winning die. That makes it very unlikely the Bruins would take solace from Long Beach State coach Alan Knipe calling them, following the match, the best serving team the 49ers have faced this season.
“We’re not a good blocking team, and we couldn’t serve hard, so (Long Beach State) had its pick of hitters,” Scates said.
Long Beach State (27-5) hit .464 and had four hitters firing lasers and recording double-digit kills, including Scott Touzinsky (14), David Lee (13), Jeff Wootton (13) and Duncan Budinger (11).
Meanwhile, UCLA struggled, hitting .295. Freshman opposite hitter and the team’s leading attacker, Steve Klosterman, was pulled from the match in Game 2 after two consecutive hitting errors caused him to mutter an expletive and garner a warning from the referee.
Senior Marcin Jagoda came off the bench to notch a team-high 11 kills.
“Marcin played great,” said Scates, who eventually emptied his entire bench. “That’s why we had a chance.”
But even Jagoda disagreed.
“We didn’t play well until it was too late,” he said. “We didn’t come out ready to play.”
Junior middle blocker Paul Johnson had 10 kills (.625), and senior Chris Peña had a team-high four blocks in his final match as a Bruin.
Senior J.T. Wenger started, but was forced out of action in the middle of Game 1 due to a sore right shoulder that had recently been bothering him.
Junior Jonathan Acosta came on to slam eight kills, but UCLA’s depth wasn’t nearly enough to wipe away the Bruins’ long faces.
Nothing was.