By BETH PALMER
LOS ANGELES–The Hollywood screenwriters down the street from Pauley Pavilion couldn’t have scripted it any better.
In a fitting close to their stand-out BYU careers, Ryan Millar served for match point and Ossie Antonetti sealed the deal with one of his signature kills, as the Cougars finished out a convincing three-game sweep of Long Beach State to take home the NCAA Men’s Volleyball Championship in Los Angeles on Saturday.
“It was never easy, for sure,” Millar said. “That was one of the best matches we played all year.”
Especially on the defensive end. BYU held the 49ers to a .136 hitting percentage in the match, including a .000 blanking in the second game.
“We just decided, ‘well, we’re gonna show them some defense,'” BYU head coach Carl McGown said. “And we did.”
BYU took the first two games by 15-9 and 15-7 scores, but Long Beach pulled it together to begin the third game, racing out to a 7-0 lead. The Cougars responded with seven unanswered points of their own and went on to a 15-10 victory and their first-ever NCAA Championship — only the second volleyball championship ever won by a non-California
school.
Millar finished the night with 15 kills, while Antonetti threw in a team-high 22. Senior Steve Hinds contributed 14 in front of 8,026 fans, a good deal of which wore blue.
“The crowd’s been our seventh teammate all year,” Millar said. “It’s so great to have those types of fans.”
And those fans cheered wildly when Antonetti followed his championship-winning kill with a hug from fellow All-American Millar and a mad dash around the court, hoisting the championship trophy above his head.
“Nobody can take that from me — I have my championship now,” he said.
Long Beach head coach Ray Ratelle conceded that the best team won Saturday, saying that even if his team had been playing its best, it may still have been unable to defeat the Cougars.
“(BYU’s) an awfully good team, and they proved it tonight,” he said.
