Even as the UCLA men’s water polo team continues to add to its 22-game winning streak, the No. 1 team in the country is still focused on getting all the pieces to finally come together.
This weekend’s games against No. 6 UC Santa Barbara (14-8, 3-4 Mountain Pacific Sports Federation) and No. 8 Long Beach State (9-12, 1-5) are the last two games of the regular season before UCLA hosts No. 4 USC (17-4, 5-2) for the finale. After that, the playoffs begin.
“(We’re trying to) get back to the basics really,” said junior center Gordon Marshall. “Play teams a little more straight up than the last couple teams that we’ve played, and that’s good for us.”
UCLA had a heavy workload in October, playing 10 games over the course of four weekends. With less than three weeks remaining before the conference tournament, the focus turns from its opponents to itself.
“We’ve been on a run for the last four or five weeks here,” said coach Adam Wright. “The nice part about this week for us is that we really get a chance to concentrate on ourselves and clean up some of the areas that we need to get better in.”
Whether the undefeated Bruins have successfully tightened up those parts of their game will be evident in Friday’s and Sunday’s games. Both Long Beach State and UCSB have played competitively of late against top-water polo programs.
Long Beach State pushed its Oct. 25 match against No. 2 California (19-4, 5-1) to double overtime before losing by one point, while UCSB nearly upset No. 5 Stanford in Palo Alto, California, before falling 10-8. The Gauchos have come within two goals of beating USC twice.
“We always want to see everybody’s best game, and we fully expect that,” Wright said. “We fully expect Santa Barbara is going to come down here and be really motivated and that gives us the opportunity to get better, and same with Long Beach.”
Friendly faces, unfriendly defense
The two skippers under the Spieker Aquatics Center lights on Friday have a long history playing with and coaching against one another.
Wolf Wigo, UCSB men’s water polo coach, has represented the United States at the Summer Olympic Games three times and was team captain when UCLA’s Adam Wright made his first of two Olympic appearances at the 2004 games in Athens, Greece.
“We have an excellent relationship,” Wright said. “He was an unbelievable player.”
Both have infused Olympic-caliber water polo tenacity into their respective programs – Wigo for the last 10 seasons, Wright for the last seven, and Marshall, UCLA’s starting center, will have to deal with an aggressive Gaucho defense that averages almost 10 exclusions a game.
“I don’t think it will be anything different,” said Marshall. “Hopefully we get some good balls in and hopefully I’ll be able to take a kick out. That’s probably the best way to combat that.”
The Bruins have struggled converting 6-on-5 opportunities in many games this season, but will want to take advantage of as many windows that come their way as possible on Friday.
A tale of two seasons
Earlier in the fall, UCLA comfortably defeated Long Beach State in an exhibition 13-4, but Wright remembers all too well just how capable of a team Long Beach State is.
“Last year they were a team that was right there in the end – almost made NCAAs, almost won the conference tournament,” Wright said. “Obviously we’re on the road there, and we know that they know how to play. They’re really well coached, and they can play the game well.”
Before the 2014 Bruins went on to win the national championship, the 49ers beat them 5-3 in the semifinal of the MPSF Tournament – the last set of games before NCAAs. Long Beach State continued to the MPSF championship and fell to Stanford by one goal.
This season has been a different story. Long Beach State’s first-team All-MPSF senior attacker Nolan McConnell is out for the season with an injury, and the team has a total of eight upperclassmen, two of whom are injured – McConnell and junior utility Nathan Pinkney.
Despite its unfortunate injuries, Long Beach State’s game against California shows just how well the team can play, and the Bruins will want to do everything they can to slow down a speedy young roster.
But they won’t want to change too much to their winning formula.
“We’ll just keep playing our game,” said junior attacker Patrick Fellner.