UCLA men’s water polo coach Adam Wright took his defending champions to the secluded corners of Spieker Aquatics Center not once, but twice last Saturday.
On better days, these meetings take place poolside.
The Bruins’ win over California was one of the most challenging games of the year, but they kept pace on their quest to become the eighth team in NCAA history to have an undefeated season.
“The biggest thing is finding a way,” Wright said. “When it’s clearly not our best day, doing whatever it takes to put ourselves in a position to be successful.”
The question remains whether or not No. 1 UCLA (21-0, 5-0 Mountain Pacific Sports Federation) can prevent sizable first-quarter holes they have to dig themselves out of later in the game.
For the second time in two weeks, the Bruins allowed a top-five team to jump out to an early, comfortable lead. On Saturday, No. 3 California scored three unanswered goals in the first four minutes of play before UCLA battled back and won 8-7 in the final minutes.
“We just didn’t come out how we usually do—ready to go,” said sophomore attacker Max Irving. “In the first quarter, we didn’t win the energy battle, so our focus for the next three quarters was to just try as much as possible to win the energy battle and then things would just fall into place from there.”
In the fourth quarter, Irving scored the decisive goal with 5:02 left on the clock, while junior goalie Garrett Danner shut out the Cal offense with five saves on the other end of the pool.
“We started out very slow, and went down 3-0 which has happened before,” Danner said. “But we were able to bring it back towards the second half.”
The last time the team had a similar episode was in the championship game of the Kap7 SoCal Invitational against No. 2 USC, when UCLA had to overcome another three-goal first-quarter deficit before, once again, pulling out a victory in the final minutes.
What largely kept the Bruins at bay in Saturday’s game, however, was the number of exclusions they surrendered. Since its game against Pepperdine on Oct. 2 when the team tallied 17 kickouts – major fouls that result in a 20-second one-player advantage for the opponent – UCLA has averaged fewer than five per game.
Against the Golden Bears, the home team found itself a man down nine times.
A number of the Bruins’ exclusions occurred not when they were shutting down drives or defending Cal’s hole set, but when transitioning from offense to defense.
With five seconds left in the third quarter, the referees sent junior hole set Gordon Marshall and Cal’s Thomas Agramonte to their respective benches on one such transition. They would not play the rest of the game.
Marshall is one of 10 players on the team who has competed in 18 or more games this season. He has scored at least once in 11 of those 18 games, second only to junior attacker Ryder Roberts, who has scored in 17 of his 18 appearances .
With Marshall out of the water, UCLA lost, quite literally, a central piece of its offense.
For the greater part of the fall, the defending national champions have given little reason for concern, but the Cal game is a reminder that upsets can happen, especially if the Bruins find themselves in first-quarter holes and a man down more often than desired.