Marc Choquette
Perspectives Editor
Despite the overall success of our athletics program, Pepperdine has always been known for the one sport that puts small schools like ours on the map: Basketball.
Circumstances have changed, however, over the past few years. Our struggling basketballers are in a period of transition, leaving an athletic void to be filled.
What’s changed is that now when I go back home for break and speak of Pepperdine to ignorant East Coasters, it is no longer the basketball team that people connect with the name.
No, the new connections come with our recent success in volleyball, whose matches at Firestone are all of the sudden rivaling and in many cases beating men’s basketball attendance.
Of course, with faces in the student body completely changing every four years and much of any team’s popularity surrounding its immediate success, to say such a change at the throne of athletic royalty at Pepperdine is so certain and permanent would be naïve.
But for now, the spikers and setters of Firestone Fieldhouse have been captivating increasing numbers of students and fans alike to heights that only a basketball victory over Gonzaga could ever really top.
The ride started in 2005. I remember sitting in a dorm at Providence College in May of that year watching our squad, the underdog little guy out in Malibu, take on UCLA, the cream of the Southern California volleyball crop, as a supposedly neutral match at Pauley Pavilion (UCLA’s home gym) for the National Championship.
The feeling is one of eerie nostalgia: 3,000 miles away watching on ESPN the guys I have seen all over campus mob each other on the middle of the UCLA floor as the defeated Bruins retreated to the locker room.
Since that victory, the subsequent trip to the White House and all the other accolades that come with being national champions, the program has been riding sky high.
This year, the team is having a year similar to the epic 2005 season. With only one loss and 13 wins, the team has again ascended to the top of the national rankings.
But what is different from the 2005 season is that fans are taking notice earlier. The Homecoming weekend matches for our then ranked #2 team against then #1 ranked BYU showcased how far our program has come in a few short years. Thursday night’s match attracted more than 2,000 fans to Firestone Fieldhouse in what was a raucous 5 game match that came down to the last few points; a game for the ages in which even fans who had not known much about the sport and the circumstances of the match-up were at the edge of their seats, living and dying on every block, every save, every spike.
The Sunday afternoon rematch, in which Pepperdine dominated the stunned Cougars 3-0, was attended by more than 2,500 fans and featured an absolutely cutthroat student section, who were in the heads of every Cougar player on nearly every point. All this support came, mind you, in the midst of the madness of homecoming weekend.
By attendance and student support alone, the argument could certainly be made that volleyball has trumped basketball in popularity at Pepperdine. But I hesitate to say this judgment should be made on anything more than a year-by-year basis. If our basketball team had the same record as the volleyball team at 13-1, Firestone’s roof would be blowing off game after game.
At only the midpoint of their season, and with remaining home matches against #2 UC Irvine and #3 UC Santa Barbara, there is still a long way to go for the boys, but the matches against BYU showed how important a home crowd can be for a team to feed on. Let’s help them win another in 2007.
03-01-2007