PROVO — Coming off a rare three-weekend string of losses, the BYU men's volleyball team hopes last week's bye has allowed physical pains and bruised confidence to heal as the seventh-ranked Cougars host No. 10 UC Irvine this weekend.
Both today's and Saturday's matches at the Smith Fieldhouse begin at 7 p.m.
BYU (7-6, 2-4 MPSF) has already lost as many matches in Mountain Pacific Sports Federation play this season as it did in all contests overall in the Cougars' run to the 2004 NCAA and MPSF championships.
A perennial powerhouse program that has three NCAA titles, as many MSPF crowns and four Final Four appearances in the past half-dozen years, BYU has suffered losses in back-to-back-to-back weekends for the first time since 1996.
Two weekends ago, BYU dropped a pair of matches at No. 2 Pepperdine. The week before, the Cougars fell to Penn State in a five-game championship match of the Hall of Fame Classic in Springfield, Mass. — despite rushing out to a 2-0 lead over the Nittany Lions. And the week before that, BYU split a pair of home matches against top-ranked UCLA.
UC Irvine (6-10, 4-7) has been up and down itself this season, claiming a pair of victories over previous No. 7 UC Santa Barbara and having suffered losses to three of nation's top five teams — UCLA, Long Beach State and Pepperdine. The Anteaters are coming off a weekend where they defeated No. 11 Pacific but were swept by Stanford.
Victories over BYU — particularly in Provo — are rare for UCI, which was swept at the Smith Fieldhouse in the first round of the 2004 MPSF tournament the last time the two teams met. The Cougars are 26-5 overall against the Anteaters, including nine straight match wins and 13 in a row in Provo.
Irvine features a pair of bookend outside hitters in Jayson Jablonsky (3.73 kills per game, .318 hitting percentage) and Jon Stellar (3.40 kpg) and a pair of standout middle blockers in Aaron Harrell (.478, .92 blocks per game) and David Smith (.460, .91 bpg).
The Cougars will counter with middle blocker Michael Burke, who is ranked eighth nationally in hitting percentage at .476 and 17th in blocks at 1.22 per game; and Victor Batista, whose 4.08 kills per game is 13th-best in the nation. Batista is expected to see considerable action back in the middle this weekend, a position he played last year before moving to the outside for 2005.
E-mail: taylor@desnews.com