By Ben Chodos

            The UCSB Gauchos burst onto the Division I scene in their first year playing at the highest level of men’s collegiate club volleyball. The team finished their impressive season with a 28-7 overall record and the ninth overall national ranking. 

            Team captain Daniel Samarin, a third year Mechanical Engineering major, has been with the team every year of his UCSB career and is excited about the team’s progress during this time.

            “This is ten times better than the last two years when we were not even in Division I,” Samarin said.

            Even though Samarin is pleasantly surprised with the team’s excellent season, he feels that their potential has not fully been tapped.

            “We wanted to win the whole thing,” Samarin said.  “We didn’t get the job done on day three of bracket play [at nationals].”

            The team will only lose one senior next year, giving Samarin a reason to have the highest expectations for the 2012 season.

            “We want to win it all,” he said.

By Brent MacDonald

Often times, tournament play is most important during season-ending conference matches held between different teams in a league. For the UCSB men’s club volleyball team, tournament experience has been regular competition. The Gauchos have won both of its tournaments this season, and play in the third tournament of the year this weekend at home.

“This tournament will be a chance to get a lot of game experience with each other,” junior Daniel Samarin said. “We’ll be able to get our timing down, which is important.”

UCSB won its first game at UC Berkeley during the pre-season, and placed fifth out of 24 teams at the Long Beach Classic tournament last weekend. One of the teams participating at Long Beach was USC, which UCSB beat during the same weekend. USC will travel to Santa Barbara this weekend to participate in the league tournament being hosted at the MAC pavilion on campus. UCLA and Cal State Channel Islands will also be playing this weekend.

UCSB plays at Channel Islands this Thursday in a league game. The Gauchos’ only other duel match has been an exhibition against Cal Poly, which resulted in a UCSB loss.

As UCSB is a club team and not school sponsored, the team has a  restricted amount of practice time per week, depending on availability of the practice courts on campus. To be one of the best teams in league, Samarin knows that each game must be utilized as an opportunity to work on team performance.

“We have a lot of really talented players but not much time to practice together,” he said. “So each tournament is a big deal.”

Though the team may not have as much time to play together as other teams in league, there is an advantage that UCSB may have over many other squads.

“Other teams lost a lot of guys from last year. We lost one,” junior Ben Johnson said. “Anytime you can play with the same group of people you’re going to be better [than other teams].”

The Gauchos will try to use their strong core of returning players to improve their defense.  So far, their offense proves to be the strongest part of UCSB’s play this season, but Samarin says that a National Championship contending team is able to succeed on defense as well.

“We’ve been good at keeping the ball in play [on offense],” Samarin said. “But we’ve been focusing a lot more on our defense, mainly blocking and digging.”