KEN IGE / KIGE@STARBULLETIN.COM
BYUH's Yu Chuan Weng has used the Seasiders' systematic approach to volleyball to become the Pacific region freshman of the year and earn a spot on the Pacific West conference's first team.
EVERY championship team is different, with different strengths and weaknesses. Seasiders shock
the systemBy Jerry Campany
jcampany@starbulletin.comBut this year's Brigham Young-Hawaii volleyball squad, which is three wins away from its 10th national championship, is really different.
"This team is presenting me some challenges I've never faced before as a coach," Seasiders coach Wilfred Navalta said.
The main challenge this year is youth. The Seasiders have only one senior and are stocked with underclassmen, players who have had only a single season to get used to Navalta's system. It is a system that has lost only once in the NCAA II tournament and won 90 percent of its games in the NAIA tournament.
Navalta, however, is the first to admit that without the talented players he is able to woo into the program, his system would not be nearly as successful. But that system has become as important a part of the program's perennial success as any single player has.
"I think it's a combination of talent and preparation to get their peak performance," Navalta said.
Navalta's system is based on the belief that no matter what the team accomplishes on the court against other schools, they can count on coming home to practice against an even tougher foe -- themselves.
Win the Pacific West Conference? Practice gets tougher. Win the regional? Practice gets tougher still.
"I am always pushing them on a higher level," Navalta said. "You have got to challenge them, make them feel uncomfortable."
Navalta begins each season much like the other teams in the country, asking his team to complete a few fundamental tasks. Every time they succeed, the test gets a little tougher and they don't leave the gym until they pass. If things go right during the year, by playoff time the team is challenging perfection every day in practice. That may help explain why the Seasiders have lost only two postseason matches in the past 11 years.
The way it works is that Navalta gives his team a few criteria to work on in each practice. If he is working on free-ball situations, in September he will ask his team to handle two or three of them successfully or run laps as a team. They don't run for conditioning or punishment -- after all, they are athletes who are used to running -- they run as a team to think about what went wrong with the team.
By the end of November, they will be expected to hit on five of the seven exercises, or run.
No matter how accomplished the team gets, it can never outrun Navalta's system. Although it seems to be based on a Marine Corps-type system of constant failure -- or the horse never quite catching the carrot -- Navalta says what makes it work is the sense of accomplishment every day. Navalta believes that the backbone of his system is positive reinforcement. Negativity has no place in a BYUH program.
No team, not even the 32-0 1997 NAIA champion, has ever left Navalta without something to challenge it with.
"That team had some high criteria," Navalta said. "The veteran teams, they understood what is happening, they didn't want to look back and say, 'We didn't give our very best.' "
But this team is different. Its talent has exceeded everyone's expectations except its own. Navalta believed at the beginning of the season that this year would be a struggle, that the group would certainly compete for the national title in two or three years, but it would have to go through the necessary growing pains first.
But the young team has been talented and cohesive enough to keep meeting Navalta's challenges, keep raising the bar with what seemed like less effort than its national championship predecessors.
Then it would just as quickly turn its attention to other things, things that the champions of the past seemed to be able to keep in perspective -- like boys and telephones and things that non-athletes call "life."
"Usually they are hungry at this point in the season," Navalta said. "My other teams were self-motivated, but this team is a little bit different because it is still young. Their feelings get hurt quickly, but if they need to be pushed, I'll push them."
Navalta will push this team because he knows where it is going. He, and assistant coaches Mike Apo and Jay Akoi, who are just as responsible for the string of championships as Navalta, have seen the elite eight and how the game changes when the nation is whittled down to so few teams.
That is why the only words coming out of a regional tournament -- where BYUH only lost a single game -- were about how they would have to play a whole lot better if they expected to succeed in the elite eight. They could continue to surprise Navalta, or inexperience and overconfidence could cause them to fall flat on their faces and give them the hunger they need for next year. As much as it doesn't fit in with his experience on how teams win and lose, Navalta hopes it is the former.
"The players don't know what is ahead," Navalta said. "I have a pretty good idea, I've seen it before."
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