After an up-and-down weekend at the Mountain Pacific Southern
California Tournament, the UCLA men’s water polo team has a
few things to be proud of and a few more areas for improvement
heading into this Saturday’s game against top-ranked USC.
Despite a third-place finish, the Bruins are by no means satisfied
with the weekend’s results. “Decent is the only word I
can come up with,” coach Adam Krikorian said when asked to
sum up the team’s performance in the tournament. “We
didn’t accomplish what we set out to accomplish, which was
(to) win the tournament. So we’re a little
disappointed.” Although the team stumbled in Sunday
morning’s semi-final matchup against second-ranked Cal, the
team did post victories over Stanford, Long Beach State and UC San
Diego. Particularly satisfying was the San Diego win, a 12-3 rout
which gave the Bruins third place in the tournament and avenged the
13-12 loss the Tritons had handed them a week ago. “We were
embarrassed by the way we played the week prior, so I think that
kind of fueled our fire and gave us some energy and passion to play
with on Sunday afternoon,” Krikorian said. “We took a
lot more pride in the way we played defense. Obviously we scored
the same number of goals, so the difference was what we did
defensively.” That defense had been one of the Bruins’
main focuses heading into the weekend, and the extra work paid off,
as the team surrendered an average of less than five goals per game
throughout the tournament. Now the team will look to fine-tune its
offense and correct its errors in execution in preparation for USC.
“We’re going to work on fixing our little
mistakes,” junior Marco Santos said. “I guess we look
at ourselves first, then later in the week we look at ‘SC
more. The biggest thing is just getting mentally
prepared.”
GOALKEEPING UNCERTAINTIES: One adjustment the
Bruins may have to make this week will be playing with a different
goalie. Although senior Will Didinger has started much of the
season, redshirt freshman Chay Lapin played throughout the weekend.
Krikorian was pleased with Lapin’s performance, but he
declined to say definitively who would start on Saturday.
“Chay’s a great goalie and Will’s a great goalie
as well, so it’s been a tough decision all year,”
Krikorian said. “Chay had a really great week of practice
last week, and I thought he deserved a chance to show what he can
do, and that’s that. He did a good job. We’ll have to
see where we go from here.” But perhaps the lingering feeling
the Bruins will have from last weekend’s tournament is that
of leaving work undone. After the tournament, redshirt freshman
Scott Davidson said he thought the Bruins didn’t play as well
as they could have against Cal. “We didn’t come out
ready to play completely,” Davidson said. “We were a
step behind them. One step behind them on every single possession.
We were there; our heads just weren’t in the game. Had we
came out with as much intensity as in the last game, it
might’ve been different.”