Chancellor Ramirez’s favorite meal is breakfast.
Unfortunately for the junior defender, breakfast is over for the UCLA men’s water polo team. It was a delicious 25-win regular season, but by no means is it enough to satisfy a team as hungry as the No. 1 Bruins (25-0, 9-0 Mountain Pacific Sports Federation).
This weekend is the next course.
“One loss and you’re out,” Ramirez said. “It really doesn’t matter what you did during the regular season. What matters is now.”
Each game the Bruins play over the next three days at the MPSF Championship tournament will mean just as much to the defending national champions as the 25 games that have come since last year’s title.
“We’re into the postseason and that’s a restart for everyone,” said senior utility Danny McClintick before Sunday’s victory over USC. “The season resets. … It’s an even higher level, and we really want to make sure that we go out there and have a good showing.”
Because of their undefeated run, the Bruins have earned a first-round bye in what coach Adam Wright called the most competitive college water polo tournament of the season.
UCLA will face the winner of No. 8 Long Beach State (11-14, 2-7) and No. 9 Pepperdine (11-14, 1-8). Whichever team comes out on top will have less than five hours before it has to play the Bruins.
The winner of the MPSF tournament, as one of four conference champions, will be automatically invited to the six-team NCAA championship tournament along with the two next-best teams regardless of conference.
So, teams whose records are not as pristine as the Bruins’ will be playing with an extra sense of urgency.
“In a sense, everybody is playing for their season right now,” Wright said. “There are so many things that can happen over the course of the three days.”
Wright speaks from experience. Last year, a highly-motivated Long Beach State team, unlikely to make the NCAA championships without winning the conference tournament, beat his Bruins 5-3 after UCLA crushed them 16-8 just a week earlier. The 49ers would lose to Stanford in the MPSF championship game by one goal the next day.
“We’re well aware that it’s a do-or-die situation every game, and we learned from it last year,” Wright said. “But last year was a good thing for us, too.”
Indeed, the taste of defeat from last year’s MPSF semifinal loss served as a wake-up call; UCLA needed to play its best water polo if the team wanted to accomplish its long-term goals. Since then, UCLA has not needed a similar lesson.
The Bruins have been cruising for 28 games in a row now, albeit sometimes in more dramatic fashion than desired.
Goalkeeper Garrett Danner is averaging almost 12.5 saves over four quarters, numbers that have put him within 22 saves of tying UCLA’s all-time career saves record – as a junior.
On the other end of the pool, junior attacker Ryder Roberts is leading the team with 49 goals, averaging 2.2 per game over 22 appearances. He scored seven goals on Oct. 2 against Pepperdine, one of the Bruins’ possible quarterfinal foes.
If the men’s water polo season was a long series of meals, his best so far has come during breakfast, but Roberts noted that he prefers a different serving.
“My favorite meal is definitely dinner,” he said.
Dinner is served.