Automatic Bid

UC Irvine will play in the NCAA men's volleyball Final Four this week after receiving the event's at-large bid. The other teams in the Final Four will be Brigham Young, which won the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation title this weekend; Loyola Chicago, which won the automatic bid from the Midwestern Intercollegiate Volleyball Assn.; and Penn State, which earned the automatic bid from the Eastern Intercollegiate Volleyball Assn. The semifinals and finals will be at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion on Thursday and Saturday.

Brittany Hayes, The Times' girls' water polo player of the year this spring from Santa Ana Foothill High, had five goals Thursday to lead the Tustin-based So Cal under-20 women's club team to a 9-2 victory over Navy in the third-place game of the Junior Nationals at Indiana University. San Diego Shores defeated Stanford, 12-5, for the championship.

The Concordia men's basketball team will try to advance to its first NAIA championship tournament when it plays Azusa Pacific for the Golden State Athletic Conference title at 7:30 tonight at Whittier College. The fifth-seeded Eagles (15-16) are the surprise of the tournament after beating second-seeded Biola, 69-63, Saturday in the semifinals. During the regular season, top-seeded Azusa Pacific (28-7) beat Concordia, 82-76, at Concordia last month and 82-74 at Azusa in January.

Scott Henderson pitched seven scoreless innings to lead USC to a 5-0 victory over Washington on Saturday, giving the Trojans their second consecutive Pacific-10 Conference championship. Henderson (8-1) scattered nine hits and struck out seven as the Trojans earned the league's automatic bid to the NCAA regional playoffs. USC led, 3-0, in the second when Marc Mirizzi doubled to right field to drive in two runs and Ryan Stromsborg followed with a run-scoring single.

UC San Diego remained undefeated and advanced to the NCAA Water Polo Championship's with a 10-5 victory Sunday over UC Davis in the finals of the Western Regional Qualifying tournament at UCSD. UCSD (17-0-1) took a 9-1 lead into the fourth period and held off UC Davis, which also received an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament in Providence, R.I., May 4-6. UC Santa Barbara defeated Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, 13-8, for third place and Cal defeated Long Beach State, 19-8, in the fifth place game.

Reggie Ingram scored 17 points, including a bank shot with six seconds remaining, to lift Southern Utah over Cal State Northridge, 83-82, in the American West Conference tournament championship game. Southern Utah (17-11) defeated Northridge for the third time this season to run its record at the Centrum to 12-1. Since the American West Conference champion does not receive an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament, the Thunderbirds are looking toward the National Invitation Tournament.

The most significant figure in all of postwar Soviet cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky died in 1986 at age 54, leaving behind only seven features, the first five produced in the Soviet Union and the last two in Italy and Sweden. The son of a poet, Tarkovsky made deliberate, cryptic films that dealt with such intangibles as the mysteries of existence, the contradictions of faith, the power of art and — most indelibly — the passing of time. He was hardly the first or only filmmaker to engage with questions of temporality in film.