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| Stanford
Invitational |
The weekend of Feb. 9-11 saw the senior women's
team venture to
California to compete as a non ranking team in the Stanford
Invitational. There we got to see the dramatic upswing in performance
level in US WOMEN'S WATER POLO since its inclusion in
the Olympics and subsequently in the NCAA program.
The top teams are now playing at a
very high level of play with
an abundance of speed and size apparent everywhere, add
to that full time professional coaching and first class facilities and
the results are inevitable.
The bad news was that we arrived on
probably the wettest weekend
in San Francisco history, with any form of shelter in
short supply the biggest victim was the unfortunate coach ( at least the
girls got to hide in the water)
We arrived late Thursday night to
give us Friday to acclimatize
to the outdoor pool, Fridays practices were a warning of
things to come, constant steady rain. In a controlled scrimmage with
the STANFORD TEAM we discovered our extra man offense
and defense was no dynamic enough, and our hole checkers struggled
against much bigger hole sets, but overall we quickly
discovered we could play at this level when we rejected our lazy bad
habits.
Our first game of the
tournament was against last years
champion UCLA , while the balance of play was even we
struggled against bigger hole sets and superior shooting, ending up on
the wrong side of a 5-20 loss.
In the afternoon we played UC-DAVIS
after an opening period
where we carried the entire play except for two long shots
we were up 4-2 and decided the game was effectively over and relaxed
slipping to 4-7 at the half. The rest of the game was
relatively even but a poor extra man performance came back to haunt us
in an 11-13 loss highlighted despite a spirited 3 goal run in
the last 5 minutes.
The next morning against one of the
weaker teams we ran up an
18-8 victory , with all players contributing well the lone
negative was conceding 8 goals against a team with lackluster offense
but the highlight was Kim Campbell's 7 goal outburst.
The final game was a game of contrast
playing CAL B, against a
strong wind we failed to make the necessary adjustments
in shooting in an evenly played half ended up on the wrong side of a
0-5 score. The second half was an entirely different story
with aggressive defense limiting CAL to no significant shots in the
second half, the third period was scoreless thanks to
unbelievable succession of near misses , posts and saves. The final
quarter finally the dam burst with four goals in a three minute
span, we salvaged a tie at 5-5 although with another two posts hit in
the last minute the story could have been different.
In all a good time was had by
all, shopping quotas were easily
reached a little advance scouting was done for our potential
California candidates as always the team was a pleasure to be with and
we learned what needs to be worked on before
nationals, Well done seniors.
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