Carson Clark didn’t knock when he came home on Wednesday night.
He just busted the door down and stormed right in.
The quiet, level-headed former Santa Barbara High volleyball star put up stellar numbers while leading UC Irvine to a 30-23, 30-25, 26-30, 30-17 win over UCSB at Rob Gym, and plenty of old friends and teammates were there to see it.
“He was on fire, and it was just so fun to watch him play like that,” said Chad Arneson, his high school coach, who was working as a line judge in the match.
Clark, a redshirt freshman, finished with a match-high 24 kills and a hitting clip of .625, adding seven digs and an ace despite a confusing environment of heckles from UCSB fans and cheers from friends and family.
“It’s great to come home and play in front of all these people, even if I got heckled a little bit,” he said with a smile.
And as for his performance?
“Yeah, I felt good out there… I guess luck was on my side a little bit tonight.”
His coach, John Speraw, wouldn’t call it a breakout performance.
“I’m not so sure, because he’s already had some pretty big matches this year… That was pretty much standard operating procedure for him. He has the potential to be quite a player in this conference,” he said.
Across the net, Clark’s former high school rival Jeff Menzel, a San Marcos grad, was doing everything he could to lead the Gauchos but had some control problems along the way. The sophomore missed his first six service attempts, winding up with eight missed serves altogether and a sub-par hitting average of .174 despite a team-high 21 put-aways.
Menzel, as usual, was dealt the lion’s share of Vince Devany’s sets and the Anteaters (4-1, 1-0 MPSF) knew it was coming. picking up 14 team blocks to the Gauchos’ five.
Clark tallied kills on three of the final six points of the first set, which ended on a Menzel service error. Clark put down six kills on seven swings in the frame. He had four kills over a 10-point span in the middle of the second to put the visitors up 26-18, and the lead stayed safe and put Irvine in the driver’s seat with a 2-0 lead in sets.
A humorous moment came along early in the third, when Arneson called one of Clark’s hits out on the back line. Clark initially thought it was in, and gave a quick second-look to his former coach before getting back to the team huddle.
Later in the set, Clark hustled and saved a ball off of the back wall, eventually putting it away for a kill at the end of a long rally to tie the score at 20 apiece, but Menzel soon responded with a nice tip and then nabbed a dig-and-kill combo to put UCSB ahead 23-20.
The Gauchos (2-2, 0-1 MPSF) held on to force a fourth set, but fell into a quick 12-7 hole and never climbed out.
Both coaches said that any kind of “Clark vs. Menzel” showdown was far from the minds of either player or team during the contest, but Clark’s former teammate, Santa Barbara High senior Chris Pratt, had his take nonetheless.
“I think Carson blew him out of the water, but I’m obviously a little biased,” he said.
Clark praised Menzel, saying he has “always been an awesome athlete,” and that he looks forward to playing against him for years to come.
Local volleyball fans look forward to watching it, too.
