Bruin Women Use Balance to Win National Title

It was a turning point in Lena Degteva’s collegiate career and maybe the defining moment of a season of fulfillment for the UCLA women’s gymnastics team.

Degteva, one of the Bruins’ two seniors, went to the balance beam looking to put the final touches on a superb team performance at the NCAA championships last week in Boise, Idaho.

The beam had given the Bruins trouble all season but in this meet not one gymnast had fallen, either in the individual or team portion.

And now it was Degteva’s turn.

“Of all the events, the beam definitely has given me the most problems,” she said. “I’ve never been strong on the beam.”

In a season during which teammates seemed to feed off one another, Mohini Bhardwaj had taken the lead with a 9.900 score. Perhaps inspired, Degteva put together her own clean performance and scored a 9.913.

She sat back and watched six other competitors fail to match it, or Bhardwaj’s score.

UCLA could have flown home without an airplane. It won its second national title in four years with a team score of 197.300, easily outdistancing Utah’s 196.875.

Degteva won her first and only NCAA individual title in her most troublesome event. Bhardwaj continued her string of great performances by winning the uneven bars competition with a 9.95 score, and the Bruins brought back enough hardware to fill a small store.

Their coach, Valorie Kondos Field, says it couldn’t have been done if her team had not made the time-honored values of preparation and commitment its sole focus.

“From Day 1, we started off talking about how we wanted to win a national championship,” Kondos Field said. “Our seniors wanted that and they got our freshmen to buy into that.

“I like to quote from John Wooden, and he once said that preparation is peace of mind that you did your job. They put in the work. . . . It wasn’t like we got hot at the right time.”

Kondos Field credited four freshmen--Onnie Willis, Maila Jones, Kristin Parker and Doni Thompson--for the difference between the Bruins and the rest of the competition. But this championship was for their stalwarts, Bhardwaj, Heidi Moneymaker and Degteva.

In three years, Bhardwaj went from a disappointing freshman to arguably the Bruins’ premier gymnast. Before the nationals, the junior had won all-around, bars and beam titles at the Region 3 competition and had won Pacific 10 titles in the all-around, vault and floor events.

“In my freshman year, I gained a lot of weight and I didn’t practice a lot,” Bhardwaj said. “I’ve always been very talented but I’ve not always been very clean. I’ve worked harder this year than any other year because I didn’t want to let my teammates down.

“If that’s all that I can get out of my college career, I’ll take it.”

Moneymaker, the team’s other senior, couldn’t duplicate her 1998 bars title or her 1999 vault championship. But she continually provided leadership in meets and daily practice.

For Moneymaker, the team’s co-leader with Degteva, a team title as a senior meant a lot more than being part of the 1997 national championship team as a wide-eyed freshman.

“It’s a different feeling, for sure, because I’m still trying to accept that it was my final gymnastics competition,” said Moneymaker, who wants to be a personal trainer. “I definitely would rather have this team title than any individual title that I could have won. We have brought UCLA to the top.”

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Loyola Marymount goes to UCLA and ends the Bruins’ 59-match home winning streak in men’s volleyball. The Bruins turn around and beat then-No. 1 Pepperdine in four games. Long Beach State drops UCLA, but the 49ers see USC exact revenge for a three-game loss a month ago.

All of this happened in the last two weeks, so is it any wonder that this weekend’s Mountain Pacific Sports Federation men’s volleyball tournament looms as a wide-open affair?

USC Coach Pat Powers said it’s impossible to predict what will happen.

“It’s just going to come down to whoever is playing hottest in the end,” he said. “Out of the top five teams in the country, four are right in the city, with Long Beach, Pepperdine, USC and UCLA. Whoever finishes the strongest will win.”

The eight-team MPSF tournament starts Thursday with eighth-seeded Loyola at top-seeded Long Beach State. Saturday, third-seeded USC hosts Hawaii, No. 2 Pepperdine hosts No. 7 Stanford, and No. 4 UCLA is at home to No. 5 Brigham Young.

USC earned a share of the Pacific Division title by defeating Long Beach last Saturday. Pepperdine won the Mountain title.

Powers said the competitive balance this season is good for the sport.

“I don’t think there are the kind of great teams there have been in the past but it might be the most competitive that it has ever been,” he said. “I’d expect most matches to come down to 15-13 in each game.

“You’ve got five teams, when you include Ohio State, that can win it all.”

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That USC is back in the national championship mix in men’s volleyball is an achievement. From 1985 to 1991, the Trojans were either NCAA champions or runners-up in six of those years. But by 1996, they’d had consecutive losing seasons.

Powers, a former USC All-American and Olympic gold medalist, has restored the tradition in his fourth season, thanks in part to sophomore outside hitter Brook Billings and senior setter Donald Suxho.

Billings was dominating in the win over the 49ers with a match-high 35 kills and 14 digs as USC wrapped up the regular season 21-4.

“I don’t think we should ever be below fifth place [in conference],” Powers said matter-of-factly. “We should split the talent evenly with the other schools. I don’t see why we can’t win [an NCAA title] every four or five years. This is where we should be.”

COLLEGE DIVISION

Cal Baptist second baseman Tim Kleveno had a brilliant week in the Golden State Athletic Conference. He had 12 hits in 16 at-bats, four of them home runs, in leading the Lancers to four victories. Kleveno has a 19-game hitting streak.

Azusa Pacific recently wrapped up its third GSAC softball championship in the last five years. On a 15-game winning streak, the Cougars, No. 3 in NAIA, are 17-3 in conference play and 40-9 overall.

In tennis, Cal State Bakersfield’s Regina Csibi and Barbara Valkova recently posted undefeated singles records in California Collegiate Athletic Assn. play for their careers. Csibi was 41-0 and Valkova was 36-0. Csibi holds the CCAA record for singles wins with 104.