After a rousing 3-2 victory over Arizona State, the Arizona volleyball team has to prepare for this weekend's matches against No. 15 Washington and No. 10 Washington State. As a bonus,the team gets to play at McKale Center for the second straight weekend.

"It definitely gave us more confidence," outside hitter Barb Bell said of the win over ASU. "We're on a roll now and going into the Washington schools this week we need to be concentrating in practice and doing the things we need to do there to try to take them."

The win over the Sun Devils gave the Wildcats a 7-7 record in the Pacific 10 Conference and a 16-8 record overall. They are now ranked fifth in the conference, three games behind fourth-place Southern Cal.

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After 13 tries, the Wildcats were able to remove the monkey from their backs. The last time they beat the Sun Devils in the regular season was in 1989. They did beat them once in the second round of the NCAA Tournament in 1993.

UA head coach Dave Rubio is 2-9 against ASU.

"We were fighting ourselves more than we were fighting ASU," Rubio said. "We became a little tentative and a little fearful and I knew that was going to happen. I had been preparing the team all week to get past that point and fortunately they responded."

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Outside hitter Heidi Bomberger played on Friday night despite a dislocated finger. She injured the pinky finger on her left hand during practice before the UCLA match.

Bomberger had reached the 400-game mark at USC on Nov. 1, an achievement shared by only four other players in UA history. She needs to play in 10 more games to tie Terry Lauchner and Charita Johnson for third place in career games played for Arizona. Bomberger has never missed a match at Arizona and has missed only 10 games in her four years as a Wildcat.

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Bell's 17 kills this weekend moved her to seventh on the Pac-10 all-time kills list, surpassing Stanford's Bev Oden. She needs four more kills to pass Oregon State's Shelly Smith.

At her current pace, Bell will have 69 more kills by the end of the season, which would put her in fourth place. The NCAA Tournament has a possible five matches, and if she were to play in all those matches at her current pace she would still be 199 kills behind all-time mark of 2,115, set by UCLA's Natalie Williams.

Bell also needs only 18 digs to become the second player in Arizona history to have 1,000 career digs and 1,000 career kills. The only other Wildcat to reach that mark was Lauchner. Bell has a 2.76 digs per game average.

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The match against ASU saw the reemergence of middle blockers Keisha Johnson and Tamika Dennis. Johnson had a career-high five digs while posting six kills and five blocks. Dennis had four kills and four blocks in three games.

"It was an overall great team effort," Rubio said. "Keisha came in and had a huge match. Tamika came in and did the same thing. She had some huge blocks. That just shows you how balanced we are. Our bench goes in and, really, we don't lose much."

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