After sandwiching tournaments in Michigan and Palo Alto around a trip to Long Beach, the UCLA women’s water polo team will play its first games of the season in the friendly confines of Sunset Canyon Recreation Center this weekend. The No. 4 Bruins will host No. 5 San Diego State today in their first conference game of the season and will battle No. 9 Loyola Marymount on Saturday.
Following a tough weekend that resulted in a pair of losses at the Stanford Invitational, the women look to regain some momentum, albeit against some strong competition. The Aztecs of San Diego State enter the match with a 6-0 record, while the Lions of Loyola Marymount are 3-1.
“SDSU and LMU are both going to give us all we want,” coach Adam Krikorian said. “We’re going to have to play better and more consistently than we did at Stanford if we want to pick up the pair of wins.”
The Bruins notched substantial wins over each of its weekend opponents a year ago, defeating San Diego State in league play 17-5 and prevailing over Loyola Marymount 11-6 at the UC Irvine Invitational.
Before this season, the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation realigned as five of its member schools left to join the Big West Conference, leaving the MPSF as an eight-team conference and creating an additional emphasis on conference matchups. San Diego State is still in the MPSF, making Friday even more pivotal.
“Our style of play won’t change based on who we’re playing,” senior attacker Tanya Gandy said. “But knowing that it is a conference game, we have put greater importance on playing hard the entire game.”
In order to bounce back from the losses suffered at the Stanford Invitational, Krikorian believes that the team will have to improve in a number of different areas.
“It’s hard to pinpoint one particular aspect of the game that went wrong for us (at Stanford),” he said. “That being said, we’ll look to improve on our transition defense, the conversion from offense to defense and the prevention of breakaways by our opposition.”
On the other hand, Gandy feels that there were many positive notes to come out of the weekend in Palo Alto that the team can bring to this weekend.
“I think that our games up to this point have provided a very good opportunity for us to come together as a team,” she said. “We’re going to need to play together this weekend like we know we can now, as well as work on some things fundamentally and execute some things a little better. At this point in the season, we know that we can have a lot more confidence in our younger girls.”
The Bruins hope that production will continue at home, where they haven’t lost in tournament play since they fell to Stanford in April of 2004. At any rate, the women will look to utilize the additional energy gained from playing in a familiar pool.