Less Talk, More Action for UCLA’s Buckner

For those who know Annett Buckner, the indication is subtle.

A slight rolling of the eyes is the only clue that Buckner, star outside hitter of the UCLA women’s volleyball team, is angry or upset.

A picture shows it best. It was taken in 1992, after UCLA had lost to Stanford in the NCAA final after having been undefeated the entire season. The other Bruins are wiping away tears, holding towels over their faces or just crying outright. Buckner is staring stoically off to the side, hands clasped, as if she knew that this pain eventually would subside and her time would come again.

And so it has. Buckner has led UCLA back to the NCAA final four, which begins Thursday in Austin, Tex.

Third-ranked UCLA (31-3) will play fifth-ranked Penn State (31-3) in the semifinals at 4 p.m. PST. Second-ranked Stanford (30-1) will play fourth-ranked Ohio State (29-2) at 6 in the other semifinal. The final will be played Saturday at 5:30 p.m.

Buckner, who averages a conference-leading 4.91 kills, will lead the Bruins in the same manner she does everything else, quietly.

With Buckner, there is no yelling, arm waving or complaining to officials.

“I just think that looks bad and 99% of the time there’s nothing you can do about it so you might as well just shake it off and play,” she said.

Displays of enthusiasm from Buckner are muted as well, limited mostly to low-fives with her teammates and a smile that creeps along the corner of her mouth.

“She does not talk much around the house, either,” said her father, Cleveland, who played basketball at Jackson State before playing for the New York Knicks in the 1961-62 season.

Buckner said that her father, who teaches math at Pasadena Blair High, didn’t push her into athletics but stressed academics instead. As a child, she would come home from school and go directly to the dining-room table to do her homework. Once, in elementary school, after missing many school days because of an illness, Buckner vowed that she would not miss a day for the next year. She didn’t miss a day for the next three years.

Buckner is equally devoted to her religion. A Baptist, she leads several teammates in a weekly Bible study. She also designs some of her clothes. She is majoring in psychology and hopes to start her own business in industrial psychology some day. But first, several years of pro beach volleyball and the 2000 Olympics are on the menu.

Buckner inspires a kind of awe in those who know her because of her quiet strength. Polly Pope, who coached Buckner at Long Beach St. Anthony High, was so impressed that she held off retirement from coaching so she could work with Buckner all four years.

“I have never in my coaching career met a young lady that has been so in tune to good moral values and work ethic in her classroom and as an athlete,” Pope said.

“Very rarely did she outwardly ever argue or get mad at somebody. . . . But she was a leader, that’s what I couldn’t understand. As quiet as she was, everybody looked up to her and tried to emulate her.”

Under Pope, Buckner led St. Anthony to the Southern Section championship in 1988 and was selected as the Division 1-A player of the year in 1988 and 1989.

After Buckner graduated in 1991, Pope became a counselor at Long Beach Millikan. In Pope’s office at Millikan, there is only one photo on the wall, one of Buckner in her UCLA uniform.

“I’m pretty proud of that,” Pope said. “It’s something that I have bragging rights about.”

Although Buckner played in a small division at St. Anthony, she made an immediate impact as a freshman at UCLA, starting in place of an injured Jenny Evans on the left side and helping the Bruins to a national championship in 1991. She finished the season third on the team with 320 kills and a .248 hitting percentage and was selected as the Pacific 10 Conference freshman of the year. Volleyball Monthly magazine also chose her as national freshman of the year.

As a sophomore, Buckner backed up Evans, who returned from her shoulder injury to play her senior season.

“It was really good to have to take that back seat, actually, because (Evans) is a great player and I think I’ve learned so much more from watching her than I would have gotten from playing myself,” Buckner said.

She counts the loss in the NCAA final that year as the most difficult experience of her career. The Bruins lost last year in the NCAA West Regional final, to BYU at UCLA, and failed to advance to the NCAA semifinals for the first time since 1987.

That loss has been a rallying point for UCLA this season.

UCLA swept through the South Regional championships at Florida, where the Bruins didn’t drop a game in defeating Duke in the regional semifinals and Houston in the regional final.

“When we went to regionals this year, we really had a different attitude,” Buckner said. “We weren’t going to let anybody beat us, and I think that loss from last year really sparked that attitude.”

You can see it in her eyes.

Notes

It’s too bad that Long Beach State’s Pyramid was not available for the NCAA women’s Northwest Regional volleyball tournament, which was held at Long Beach last weekend. The new Pyramid is one of the nation’s best arenas for volleyball because it has a ceiling that points to a peak 180 feet above the court. But the Pyramid is still under construction and the school could not provide practice time in it for all four teams at the regional championship, according to Scott Cathcart, assistant athletic director in charge of media relations. So the defending national champion 49ers played host to the Northwest Regional in the Gold Mine gym, which has hanging light fixtures. Ohio State defeated Long Beach, 15-5, 14-16, 15-9, 15-5, Saturday for the regional championship and advanced to the final four.

For the record: It was incorrectly reported in this column on Nov. 30 that the Pepperdine women’s basketball team had a losing season in 1991-92. The Waves were 17-11 that season.