Warriors a near-unanimous choice as nation's No. 1 team
By Stephen Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer
The University of Hawai'i men's volleyball team retained its No. 1 ranking in this week's USA Today/American Volleyball Coaches Association poll.
"Unless they were going to give it to Shanghai, it was no surprise," UH coach Mike Wilton said.
The defending national champion Warriors are 4-0 this season. Their exhibition loss to Shanghai Oriental Saturday night does not count in the standings. Six members of China's national team played for Shanghai, which practices up to six hours every day.
Unlike last week, Wilton, who is a voting member, this time picked UH No. 1. In all, the Warriors received 15 of 16 first-place votes.
UC Irvine (7-0), which has defeated 18-time national champion UCLA twice this season, placed second, receiving the other No. 1 vote.
UCLA was third, followed by Brigham Young and Cal State Northridge.
The Mountain Pacific Sports Federation, of which UH is a member, placed seven teams in the top 10. The Warriors are scheduled to play 14 of 15 teams in the poll this season.
• A new beginning: Since the 1970s, UCLA has claimed volleyball titles as regularly as Joe Souki wins elections. Former Brigham Young coach Carl McGown likened the Bruins to the New York Yankees. UC Santa Barbara coach Ken Preston once said the Bruin coaches can tell recruits, "You can win at least one national championship in your four years here."
But times are changing, and the nation's best conference is now an open race.
"The league is getting tougher and tougher," Wilton said. "There's a large amount of good players, and they can't all go to one school. It stands to reason everybody is going to get good."
NCAA Division I-AA teams are limited to the equivalent of 4.5 scholarships per year. But until recently, many schools — as a cost-saving move or fearful of disrupting gender-equity balance — did not fully fund men's volleyball programs.
Long Beach State coach Alan Knipe recalled the 49ers spent the equivalent of two scholarships when they won the national championship in 1991. Cal State Northridge's men's team only became fully financed this year.
"Now, everyone is catching up to the teams that have won," Knipe said.
Knipe said volleyball is widely popular at the grassroots level "but it's not growing at the Division I level. With that much talent — and some teams are dipping into the international pool, too — teams are finding ways to get deeper and deeper."
The rally-scoring system, implemented for the men's sport in 2001, "gives lesser teams a better shot at sticking in a game," Pacific coach Joe Wortmann said. "It doesn't give the more powerful teams a time to dominate. Now, if you have a hot server, you can score five or six points in a row."
Wilton called the rally-scoring system — in which a point is scored on every play — "legislative parity."
The evidence can be found in the standings. UC Irvine, which has struggled in recent years, has defeated UCLA twice. Pacific, 1-3 in nonconference matches, rallied from a 2-0 deficit to upset BYU Monday. UC San Diego, which has never had a winning season, defeated Ohio State twice.
"It seems everyone in our league is going to have a good team," Wortmann said.
Still, some experiments are better left in the lab. During the fall, some teams played one-game matches in which the winner was the first to score 140 points.
"I thought it was like getting a tooth pulled," Knipe said, "and having the dentist take an hour to pull it. I don't have the power to decide on the rule, but if it comes across Long Beach for a vote, it's a definite, 'no.' "
• Happy anniversary: This is the fourth year since the libero, the back-row defensive specialist, was implemented in the men's game.
"At first, I didn't personally recruit liberos," Wortmann said. "We used to take an outside hitter who wasn't getting into the game and make him a libero. That's changed. Someone who can pass and play defense can make or break a team. The libero is becoming one of, if not the most, important member of your team."
