Water Polo in Rut
By Susannah Edelbaum
Sports Editor

The men's water polo team had a weak start at the UCSC Slug Fest, but finished playing much more aggressively. Disappointingly, Pomona-Pitzer still went 0-5 at the tournament, held over the weekend at UC Santa Cruz.

”Our problem with Slug Fest is we didn’t play well in games we should’ve won,” Ben Blum ’04 commented.

They played CMS and Santa Clara, both teams they felt they could beat, as well as the Air Force, which plays in Division I. The Sagehens were also matched up against UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz. In what has become a trend of the team this season, the players adjusted the intensity of their competition during each game to that of the team they were playing.

“We know that we could [have beaten] Claremont,” Coach Jason Gall said of Saturday’s game against CMS, in which P-P was defeated 6-9. The game overall was less than spectacular, and the only reason the Sagehens didn’t come out on top was that they weren’t working together.

“There were a lot of opportunities to put the ball in the net, and we were setting ourselves up well,” Blum said. The team had a fairly good chance to win, but “we were playing individual again,” Blum noted.

“We were doing really well, but we let it slip out of our hands in the fourth quarter,” he added.

The Sagehens had a better performance that day when they played UC Santa Clara, but were still defeated 5-13.

“They really jumped on us,” Carlo Diy ’06 said. In particular, the Sagehens found themselves facing a lot of odd-man rushes, and the Davis players were able to move the ball around very effectively.

“Bad shots turn into counterattacks,” Diy said. "We needed better anticipation.”

P-P and Santa Clara will meet again at the Convergence tournament on October 11, so the team “is getting focused on doing what we can [to beat them],” Diy added.

The team’s last game of the day was against the Air Force. As they have been doing all season, the Sagehens responded to being matched up against a particularly strong team by playing in top form. Both the offense and defense had were warmed up and working together, though the team was defeated 4-13.

“The game was a lot of fun,” Diy claimed. “We came out a lot more focused, a lot more intense.”

The Sagehen’s play was strong overall on the second day of the tournament. The team started off with a game against UC Davis, in which they were defeated 5-8, but played much more aggressively than they had against either CMS or Santa Clara.

The team’s last game of the day, against UC Santa Cruz, was a little rougher. Both teams “came out really fired up,” Diy said, but it was the home team’s last game in their home tournament, and Santa Cruz had drawn a pretty big crowd.

“The mental part of it is a big deal,” Gall said. Though P-P was defeated 4-14, the Sagehens kept up strong communication with one another, especially on defense, throughout the game.

“We were letting teammates know where to cover up and talking a lot more effectively,” Diy said.

The Sagehen’s top scorers at the tournament included captain Ben Speicher ’03, who found the back of the net eleven times, and Ian Kusao ’06, who scored another five goals for P-P. There were “a lot of highlight performances from the freshmen,” Blum noted.

The team has proven it can play strongly and effectively in their games against upper division teams. The key now is to work on keeping up this level of play against Division III, and most importantly, SCIAC teams. Overall, P-P seems confident of their chances at SCIAC, which starts later this month.