NCAA VOLLEYBALL : UCLA Women Quietly Confident This Year

Jenny Johnson peeked over a microphone Wednesday and quietly tried to dispel a myth about the UCLA women’s volleyball team.

It’s not that the Bruins aren’t thrilled to be playing in the NCAA final four, which begins today at the University of Texas’ Frank Erwin Center; it’s just that she and her teammates don’t make big displays of emotion.

“It’s more of a mellow attitude, more of a laid-back attitude about the game,” she said at a news conference. “It doesn’t mean we’re any less intense.”

They will discover whether that approach works well enough to move them one step closer to the championship today, when they play Penn State in a semifinal match at 4 p.m. PST. Stanford will play Ohio State at 6 p.m. in the other semifinal.

The third-ranked Bruins (31-3) got a lesson in intensity earlier this season in a loss to Penn State at the Florida State tournament.

“(Penn State) just outplayed us, outhustled us, just wanted to win a little bit more,” UCLA Coach Andy Banachowski said.

UCLA since has improved. Led by Annett Buckner, the Pacific 10 Conference player of the year, the Bruins lost only twice more in the regular season--at Stanford and at Washington--before sweeping through the NCAA South Region without losing a game.

“We have learned how to compete,” Banachowski said. “We have increased our intensity, but I think (the Bruins) still play with the same quiet composure that I noticed at the beginning of the year.”

Even so, it is apparent that the Bruins are motivated. They want to prove that their early exit from the tournament last year, when they lost to Brigham Young in the West Regional final at UCLA, was a fluke. The Bruins seek their fourth NCAA title after having won in 1984, 1990 and 1991.

First, UCLA will have to get past fifth-ranked Penn State (31-3), a scrappy team that beat top-ranked Nebraska (31-3) in the Mideast Region championship by diving for every ball. Last year, Penn State advanced to the NCAA final at Madison, Wis., where it lost to Long Beach State.

“We’ve already had the thrill of getting to the final four,” said Salima Davidson, the Nittany Lions’ senior setter. “Now, you want it. You want to come here and you want to play well and you want to win.”

Second-ranked Stanford (30-1) is the favorite. Its only loss was to UCLA at Pauley Pavilion early in the season. Kristin Folkl, a freshman who was called “the recruit of the decade” by Volleyball Monthly magazine, leads the Cardinal with 4.6 kills per game and a .362 hitting percentage.

Fourth-ranked Ohio State (29-2) is led by Jenny Jackson and Gabriele Jobst, who average 3.92 and 3.83 kills, respectively.

The final will be held at 5:30 p.m. Saturday.

Notes

Annett Buckner needs 23 kills to break the Patty Orozco’s 1983 UCLA record of 627 in a season. Buckner, USC’s Meika Wagner and Long Beach State’s Nichelle Burton were named first-team All-Americans. Lauri Yust and Kelly Kuebler of USC, Traci Dahl of Long Beach and Alyson Randick of UCLA made the second team. . . . The only time a team from the West did not win the NCAA title was in 1988, when Texas beat Hawaii. Texas lost its chance to play at home in the final four this season by losing to Florida in the second round. . . . California has long dominated women’s volleyball--half the teams ranked in the top 10 are from the state. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that California breeds the best players. Of the 30 players starting for teams in the final four, only six are from California.