GameTracker error gave BYU volleyball a loss

Fans of the top-ranked BYU men's volleyball team may have thought late Friday or even early Saturday that the Cougars fell in five games at No. 6 UC Irvine Friday night.

But, in fact, the Cougars remain undefeated after downing the defending NCAA champion Anteaters.

Many tracking match results — including BYU's sports information officials, the Deseret Morning News and other media outlets — were following real-time BYU-UCI game action via GameTracker results as posted online by UC Irvine.

Unfortunately, UC Irvine's GameTracker service posted incorrect late-match scores and final results, showing that the host Anteaters won the five-game marathon when BYU actually triumphed, 30-28, 32-34, 30-22, 28-30, 28-26.

The GameTracker incorrectly showed that UCI had won the fifth and deciding game 28-26, which in turn gave the match to the host Anteaters.

When the "official" yet incorrect UCI winning score and results were initially posted, BYU's sports information department, the Deseret Morning News and others started filing reports about BYU suffering its first loss of the season.

Since the match was on the West Coast with an 8 p.m. MST starting time and went to a very extended five games, local newspapers were pushing deadline to get a story in the Saturday's editions — even before the loss-win fiasco.

But wait.

A UCI sports information worker in Irvine called her BYU counterpart in Provo to say GameTracker had malfunctioned ... and that the Cougars had actually won the fifth game by the 28-26 score incorrectly given to UCI. BYU, which had already sent out a press release announcing the Cougars' loss, subsequently scrambled to send out a corrected version.

At the Deseret Morning News, we had written a story about the BYU "loss" (confirmed by the BYU press-release email), had laid out the copy and headline on the electronic page and had typeset the page, sending it on to the backshop to make a metal plate for the printing presses.

Already well past deadlines, we were alerted with the correction with just enough time to call off the backshop, rewrite the headline and text and send a new page to have a correct report throughout our editions (although some of the early editions may show the quick-read "inset score" as UCI beating BYU 3 games to 2, which was corrected for later editions).

Adding to the confusion was that the original BYU "loss" story and headline had already been posted online. While the story and headline were quickly corrected online with the winning results, the incorrect "BYU loss" headline still appeared on some online selection menus as late as mid-morning Saturday, although it did link to the correct "BYU win" headline and story.

---

E-mail: taylor@desnews.com