2015 Men's Volleyball Records
Overall - 13-16
Conference - 6-10
Home - 8-5
Away - 5-11
Head men’s volleyball Coach Joel Walton and his team will travel to Los Angeles on March 7, 2016 where they will face off against 19-time National Collegiate Athletic Association champions University of California Los Angeles.
The two programs have the most wins in NCAA history and agreed to the non-conference matchup which will be the first time the teams will have seen each other since 2011. The Bruins won the previous matchup held in Honolulu in four sets.
The two teams have a storied history with each other that Walton has not soon forgotten, who recalls facing UCLA during his days as an assistant coach under head coach Don Shondell. The Cardinals were the only team to defeat the Bruins in their 1995 season. UCLA would later go on to win the national championship knocking out the Cardinals in the semi-finals.
West coast schools such as UCLA, Pepperdine and UC Irvine have always been known as volleyball powerhouses.
“In everybody’s minds, west coast volleyball was way up here, and we weren’t nearly as competitive as they were so it was difficult at that time in the 80s to play against those teams and feel like you really had any chance,” Walton said.
Walton played for Ball State from 1985-1988. During that time, he participated in two of the 15 total NCAA tournament appearances that Ball State has made.
Playing west coast teams prior to the tournament was a rare occurrence due to the fact they did less traveling than what they do today.
“There was probably a feeling among the guys on our team that we were inferior—not that we would have voiced that," Walton said. "We looked up and idealized those west coast players.”
In the 1990s and the 2000s that mindset began to change. Now that the Midwest Intercollegiate Volleyball Association has been on the rise, the mindset of the "untouchable" west coast volleyball stigma begins to diminish.
In three out of the last five years, a team from the MIVA has won the national championship. Walton claims a number of different factors have contributed to this shift of power.
“All of the programs in our conference are becoming more competitive,” Walton said. “So were pushing each other and on a night-to-night basis you have to play well if you want to win.”
From a geographical standpoint, Walton, along with other coaches in the MIVA, is now recruiting club volleyball players out of the Milwaukee, Ohio, Chicago and St. Louis areas. These players have experience playing against and defeating these elite west coast club teams.
“Before even coming to college, these kids have experiences, or they come out of experiences where they are playing and representing the United States for youth national teams or junior national teams and they are being mixed with these west coast players on a regular basis,” Walton said. “Players from the Midwest are just as good and in many cases better than any of the guys that are coming out of the west coast.”
UCLA is 22-3 all-time against the Cardinals. The last time the Cardinals defeated the Bruins was in 2008 winning on back-to-back nights at John E. Worthen Arena.
Ball State will play one other Mountain Pacific Sports Federation match this season hosting Stanford on Jan. 8 in the regular season opener at Worthen Arena.
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