VANCOUVER - Coming off their first sweep of the year in Calgary, the No. 8 UBC Thunderbirds come home this weekend with a good chance to extend their three-match winning streak against the Regina Cougars. This is UBC's final home series until January.
Both men's volleyball games this weekend will be streamed with live statistics at
CanadaWest.tv.
No. 8 UBC Thunderbirds (4-4)
Last Week: W 3-1, W 3-1 at Calgary
Two weeks ago the Thunderbirds endured an extremely challenging road trip to Saskatchewan that featured everything from flight delays to food poisoning, and after a huge loss in game one they bounced back for one of their more impressive wins in recent history, given the circumstances.
That seemed to give them plenty of momentum to take into Calgary last week, where they won six out of eight very tough sets. In the second match, the first three sets were decided by the minimum two points, and the final set was won by three.
Jarrid Ireland (Winnipeg, MB) had his best weekend of the year. The explosive outside hitter had been sidelined with injury earlier this season but he put down 13 kills on .393 hitting to open the series against Calgary, and then 22 kills on .277 hitting to close it.
That kind of performance from Ireland has to be extremely reassuring for coach
Richard Schick and the team, given the injury troubles they have dealt with over the past couple years. And Ireland feels like one of the savvy veterans of the team in just his second year, thanks to how much he played as a rookie and how young UBC's core players are. So getting him rolling again is huge if this team wants to achieve its full potential.
Regina Cougars (1-7)
Last Week: L 3-2, W 3-1 vs Winnipeg
A 1-7 record might not look like much, but you don't have to tell the T-Birds how deceiving an early-season record can be in Canada West men's volleyball. Like UBC, the Cougars started out against three straight ranked teams, including Nos. 1 and 2, Alberta and Trinity Western.
The Cougars actually took Trinity Western to five sets, and were in another five-set loss last week against Winnipeg. A 3-7 record with one win against the No.2 CIS team looks very different from 1-7, but the Cougars really weren't far from it, so the T-Birds can't take anything for granted this week.
They do have lots of ground to make up if they have any hope of recovering from that rough start though, and finding a consistent source of offence would be a good place to start. The Cougars rank dead last in the conference with a .097 hitting percentage, and that didn't change much even in their win last week as they still hit well below .200.
Andrew Nelson leads the attacking group with 3.27 kills per game while basically hitting for the team average. The only Cougar producing a significant amount of offence efficiently is Rhodri Simmonds, who hits just under .300 out of the middle while averaging about two kills per set, but Regina needs more options to attack with if they want to keep up with teams like UBC.
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