Returning home from a tough weekend tournament and heading into another weekend filled with road games, some teams might take it easy at practice.
The No. 1 Bruins, however, did not get to that ranking by sitting idly on the pool deck.
The UCLA women’s water polo team (10-0) is coming off a complete four-game sweep of the Stanford Invitational in Palo Alto to stay undefeated after 10 games this season. This weekend, the Bruins will play three games on three consecutive days at three different schools across Southern California.
The first matchup will be against No. 10 UC Irvine (4-1) at 7 p.m. on Friday. Next, the team will travel to face No. 16 Cal State Northridge (3-3) at noon on Saturday. The final game will be another noon start, this time on Sunday at No. 14 Long Beach State (6-2).
Though the schedule may look daunting, UCLA is an experienced team, familiar with long stretches of back-to-back games. Both the conference and NCAA tournaments are scheduled with the same format as this weekend’s slew of matches.
The Bruins are confident they can keep up the exceptional pace that they have already displayed so far this season.
“I think we’re in incredible shape,” junior attacker Tanya Gandy said. “The more (games), the better, I think.”
With such endurance, the Bruins do not foresee toning down the intensity of their daily practice routine.
“We feel like we should be able to train hard this week and still be able to play well,” coach Adam Krikorian said.
In addition to starting an experienced squad of upperclassmen, the Bruins have had no problem dipping into their bench.
Already this season, UCLA has had 16 different players score at least one goal.
“Certainly by the time we get to Sunday, we’re going to have to use our depth a little bit, and hopefully it’ll help us,” Krikorian said.
With the excellence the team has shown over the past decade under Krikorian comes the ability to know when things are working according to plan and when they are not, no mater what the record says.
So now, even with a top ranking and their last loss 10 months behind them, the Bruins are far from feeling perfect.
“We’re happy, obviously, that we went 4-0 (at Stanford), but at the same time, I think we saw, especially after looking at the video, that there were a lot of mistakes being made and a lot of different things we need to work on,” Krikorian said.
The Bruins will look to improve their consistency this weekend ““ the three games will be their first official slate of MPSF conference games.
“The goal is to be the No. 1 seed going into the conference tournament,” Krikorian said. “Obviously that process starts this weekend.”