Long Beach Volleyball Overcoming Hurdles

It is only the middle of September, the women’s volleyball season is two weeks old, and Long Beach State Coach Brian Gimmillaro has seen his team:

* Conduct only one practice session since the season began.

* Fly cross-country for a volleyball match one night after playing the previous evening in Long Beach.

* Lose its starting left outside hitter for the season because of a torn anterior cruciate ligament.

* Win its first six matches before losing Saturday.

A busy stretch ended with a five-game loss to Brigham Young, but the 49ers’ record is no small achievement when you consider that Gimmillaro has not had one set lineup.

Senior outside hitter Mariah Marquis won’t return from a knee injury until October. Junior Tayyiba Haneef returned Saturday after sitting out five matches because of an abdominal strain.

The biggest blow was losing sophomore Lindsay Phillips, who ripped up her ACL against American during the 49ers’ three-game trip to Washington.

“Lindsay is one of the top outside hitters in the country,” Gimmillaro said.

It has left Gimmillaro, now in his 16th year, scrambling to patch together a regular lineup. This from a team that has gone to three consecutive Final Fours.

“We’re on our sixth or seventh lineup from where we believed it would be [at the start of the season],” he said. “We’ll get healthier, but we won’t ever be completely [together] as a team this year.

“It’s going to take some players [developing] about 1 1/2 years in the span of a year to make up the difference. Right now, we’re not the defensive team that we ought to be.”

And yet, the 49ers continued to win until a hot BYU team rallied after Long Beach had a two-game lead and a 13-11 advantage in the third game.

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It seemed like a good idea at the time. Gimmillaro, who plucked Cheryl Weaver out of Washington, D.C., three years ago, wanted his All-American middle blocker to make a triumphant hometown return.

It soon turned into a logistical nightmare. The 49ers could only line up games against Navy, Georgetown and American a week before the target dates of Sept. 9-10.

The problem was Long Beach opened its season against St. Mary’s on Sept. 1, meaning the 49ers had to fly to Washington the morning after playing a home night match.

“It was very, very hard,” Gimmillaro said. “We knew it would be tough, but we really wanted Cheryl to be able to play in front of her family and friends and that was the only weekend we could do it.”

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The UCLA women’s soccer team has also had to deal with a major injury.

Freshman defender Nandi Pryce suffered a broken left leg during Saturday’s 2-0 victory over Vanderbilt in the USC Fila Challenge and is out for the season. UCLA officials are looking into whether Pryce, who played in only five matches, qualifies as a medical redshirt.

Pryce came to UCLA as one of the most highly regarded recruits in the program’s eight-year history. A two-time finalist for national high school player of the year, the Florida native was an alternate for the U.S. Olympic team.

“I think when I first went down, I knew it was broken,” Pryce said from her room at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center. “The girl kicked me in the shin. It was totally a clean play.

“Obviously no one wants to be out the whole year. I’m trying to stay positive for my team.”

Pryce said she has been playing with a stress fracture in her left tibia for nearly two years and said doctors had warned her that it could break at any time even though she was cleared to play.

“I knew there was always that chance, but it never crossed my mind when I was playing,” she said. “When you’re in the match, you don’t think about it.”

Pryce’s presence was apparent in her short time with the Bruins.

“Her experience is very evident on the field,” UCLA assistant coach Lisa Shattuck said. “The way she controls things in the back, you can tell she’s played at a high level.”

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USC gained the No. 1 ranking in Volleyball magazine’s women’s college poll, released Tuesday, on the strength of winning the MetRx Invitational at USC last week.

The Trojans also jumped to sixth in the AVCA/USA Today poll. UCLA, which opened the year No. 1, fell to eighth after suffering its third loss of the season to Nebraska on Sunday.

COLLEGE DIVISION

Cal State L.A. tied with Cal State Bakersfield for last season’s California Collegiate Athletic Assn. volleyball championship, but the Golden Eagles have had a tough time dislodging the 10-time CCAA champions from the top spot.

That may change this year. The Golden Eagles stunned host Bakersfield, 15-9, 15-5, 15-12, Friday to improve to 10-0 overall and 2-0 in conference.

The victory moved Cal State L.A. from 11th to sixth in the NCAA Division II poll, the Golden Eagles’ first appearance in the top 10 since they swapped the No. 1 ranking with the Bakersfield throughout the 1996 season.

For Bakersfield, it was the worst home loss in eight years.

“We haven’t won up there since 1997,” said fifth-year Cal State L.A. Coach Bill Lawler. “It was great. [The fans] were kind of quiet and they left the gym real quickly. They’re not used to seeing their team get handled like that in their own place.”

Kasey Jungwirth, who had 20 kills in the match, is one of the three key seniors on the team. Middle blocker Linda Saucedo and outside hitter Jamie Griffin also remembered last year’s five-game defeat in Bakersfield in which the Golden Eagles had a two-games-to-none lead.