After dropping both matches at Grand Canyon last week, USC men’s volleyball (10-4) looks to get back in the win column during their matches against crosstown rival UCLA. Head coach Jeff Nygaard, who won two national championships as a player with the Bruins, said that despite the rivalry, the Trojans’ preparation plans will remain the same.
“Everyone knows this is a rival game. It’s a big week of just UCLA vs. USC. I mean, for me, the stakes probably have overtones or undertones, I go back a number of decades,” Nygaard said. “But in terms of preparation for the team, it’s business as usual. It’s not too high, not too low, it’s just taking care of things on our side of the net, continue to grow, continue to learn, continue to get better and better every time we go out there.”
USC dropped one spot in this week’s AVCA/NVA poll to No. 11, while UCLA held steady at No. 4 after splitting their series against BYU last week in Provo. Despite their losses against GCU, Nygaard said the Trojans still walked away learning from the experience against the Lopes, who are now ranked first in the nation.
“The fact that we came away taking a game and then going deuce in that third game in the second night, after having seen some things that we probably hadn’t seen a team do the night before, they came back and we learned on the fly that we just keep adding and adding and adding,” Nygaard said. “We’ve been saying it for a long time: this group is scrappy, they fight hard, they’re completely unified as a team, and they get stronger the more we play.”
Senior middle blocker Kyle Paulson echoed Nygaard’s statement about the Trojans leaving GCU with new lessons learned.
“We had some good moments against GCU, obviously not the results we wanted,” Paulson said. “But there were a lot of things we learned and I think we’re gonna apply those this week, and hopefully we get some wins.”
Paulson, who has yet to win a match against the Bruins, stressed the importance of keeping practices consistent as they prepare for UCLA.
“It’s a huge rivalry for our school, the other L.A. school,” Paulson said. “One thing is you just gotta play your game, what you practice, it’s no different than any other game we’ve played. So just trust the process that we’ve been doing and we’ll go out there and compete.”
Nygaard values the importance that team leaders, like Paulson, have on making sure the team stays focused throughout the week.
“Our leaders are also really great sounding boards of what is important, knifing through a lot of the stuff that isn’t all that important that we just don’t need to focus on,” Nygaard said. “We don’t need any of the distractions, we just need to go out there and take care of things on our side of the net. And we have confidence that we can go out and compete against anybody in the nation. So this is another opportunity for us to go out there and prove that.”
Nygaard sees the Crosstown Showdown matchups as a way for USC to evaluate where the team is at, especially with the Trojans having played just over half of their matches so far this season.
“That’s a team that won a national title last year,” Nygaard said. “And so we’re meeting them right at a really great time of the year, to where there’s learning to be done after that so that we can continue to chip away at getting those one or two points. A lot of this year has been just one or two more points, and we are getting the wins that this team’s working hard for.”
The Trojans host the Bruins at Galen Center on Thursday at 7 p.m. before traveling to UCLA on Saturday, where the first serve will take place at Pauley Pavillion at 5 p.m.