With its sweep of the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation regular season complete, the No. 1 UCLA men’s water polo team will start as the top seed at the MPSF Championship Tournament, which starts on Friday at Long Beach State.
The Bruins will either play the No. 7 University of the Pacific Tigers or the No. 12 UC Santa Barbara Gauchos, who will face off in a play-in game early Friday morning before the winner takes on the Bruins at 3 p.m.
UCLA beat Pacific twice and UCSB once earlier this season, including a 15-6 blowout against Pacific during the NorCal Classic in September.
The prospect of facing an unspecified opponent doesn’t particularly faze coach Adam Wright.
“We don’t know who we play until the day we play. It comes down to not what they do, but what we do,” Wright said.
The team has spent a lot of time working on exactly what they will do. Practice on Wednesday night stretched well past its scheduled ending time as Wright made the team run plays at the net until he was satisfied with both offensive and defensive performances.
The last time UCLA swept the MPSF regular season was on the way to the team’s last NCAA title in 2004. Last year, UCLA entered the tournament as No. 3 in the country, but fell to Stanford in the semifinals and Pacific in the third-place game to finish fourth in the conference and without a bid for the national tournament.
After last year’s performance, the team is optimistic that they can improve. Wright said the team jumping in the pool on Friday is very different to the one that fell in last year’s postseason.
Senior attacker Paul Reynolds said that while the team feels ready, they would still be focusing on improvement through their last practice on Thursday night.
One constant between those two teams, however, is the lineup of older members on the team. Reynolds played in last year’s tournament and said he knows what this weekend entails.
“I know what to expect. (I’ll still) treat it the same way,” he said, adding that he felt his experience would bolster the team over the weekend.
Younger members of the team are also expected to make contributions. Facing his first collegiate postseason, freshman utility Alex Roelse believes the level of play at the conference tournament will exceed anything he’s faced so far this season.
“I think it’s gonna be more intense. You have to be prepared from the first minute to the last minute for three straight days,” Roelse said.
If UCLA wins its first game, it will play the winner of the Long Beach State versus California game. Those two teams are tied for fourth nationally, although Long Beach is seeded higher due to a better conference record. UCLA has also beaten both teams this season, with a 16-8 win against Long Beach last weekend sealing the Bruins’ perfect conference record.
Statistically, the Bruins are at or near the top of the MPSF by a number of measures. The team has only allowed 5.30 goals per game, led by sophomore goalkeeper Garrett Danner’s 6.05 goals against average, both of which are top in the conference.
On offense, the Bruins have scored an average of just over 15 goals per game, placing them third in the conference. And, thanks in part to a packed schedule that had more games than any other MPSF team, the Bruins’ 25 wins puts them above the rest of the conference.