The men’s water polo team suffered a tough loss in the final game of the Division III National Collegiate Club Championship held on campus last weekend. The Cards finished with a score of 6-8 against the team from Lindenwood University, taking second place and ending hopes of three-peating the national title.
“Everyone played really well and we worked real hard all year for this tournament,” said Mike Molina ’07. “Obviously, we would have liked to come out with a win.”
Opening the two-day tournament Saturday morning against Macalester University, the Cards comfortably won 14-8 with seven different players scoring.
That evening, the Cards handily dominated Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 11-0. In that game, goals came from nine different team members, including goalies Molina and Micah Siegel-Wallace ’10, who combined for the shutout victory.
“In the first two rounds, we were relatively unchallenged,” said Head Coach Mac Clonan ’05, “Whether that hurt us or not, we got to where we wanted to be.”
In the final game Sunday, the culmination of the tournament as well as of the entire season, the Cards started off strong with Mike Pepi ’08 winning the first swim-off and subsequently scoring the first goal at the 6:34 mark.
Lindenwood’s Lions answered quickly though, as was the case throughout the game, scoring two goals in quick succession and one more after a successful shot by Andrew Jaycox. That goal put the Cards behind for the first time in the tournament, and they would trail on three other occasions before the end of the match.
Forty seconds into the second quarter, the Lions brought the score to 2-4 in their favor, where it stayed until the last minute of the period. Another goal from Pepi and sharp passing between Pepi, Ben Byers ’07, and John Haley ’07 tied the game at four with one second to go in the first half.
Lindenwood scored once in the third quarter, the only goal of the period. Jaycox evened the score at five at the start of the last period. However, less than 20 seconds later, the Lions’ Danilo Lazarevic whipped a wraparound shot past defender Matt Brownstein ’07 and into the goal. Lazarevic scored twice more in the period, bringing his game total to six.
With 32 seconds remaining, Haley, the team’s leading scorer, pounded the ball past the Lindenwood goalie, but hopes of a Wesleyan comeback were quelled as the Lions held onto the ball for the last 30 seconds of the game.
Lazarevic, who was named the Most Valuable Player of the tournament, was seen as the only thing between the Cards and victory.
“We let ourselves get beaten by one guy,” said Byers. “He tied us.”
Refusing to play both offense and defense, as is the standard in water polo, Lazarevic stayed at the two-meter mark in front of Wes’s goal. This forced Brownstein, a strong offensive leader, to hang back and changed the Cards’ offensive game into a five-on-five challenge.
“He changed the way the game was played, which was unsettling,” Clonan said. “The thing about it is you can’t really prepare to play a game five-on-five. If we played them again today, we’d win, but on the fly it was tough to try and beat them at that game.”
Though the Cards tried to implement a new strategy as the game wore on, Byers said he and his teammates struggled to execute the changes.
“I think we knew how to beat him, but we didn’t make the right adjustments,” he said. “We talked about them on the bench, but didn’t make them in the water.”
Perhaps a small consolation compared to the title, five of the Cards were named to the All Tournament teams: Byers, Haley, Brownstein, Molina, and Jaycox.
“It’s not the best second prize—I’d take winning” Byers said. “But it speaks a lot about our team that we had five guys chosen.”
That overall, well-distributed strength made Wesleyan the “most talented team out there,” according to Byers.
“We had a great balance of everything you need to have a great polo team,” Haley said. “We had no glaring weaknesses.”
With more fan support than usual over the weekend, the students and parents in the stands helped the team maintain its intensity throughout.
“When the ref has to come over and tell them [the crowd] to stop using profanity, that’s always a plus,” Byers said.
Ending with a final record of 15-13-1, a less than perfect standing didn’t translate to a less than successful season, for players or coaches.
“Obviously there’s room for improvement for everybody, and I felt like we came up a little bit short of what we were capable of, but we made some big strides,” Clonan said. “For every game we lost, we were applying the necessary pressure, we were always capable of winning, we were never being dominated, we were always right there.”
The team this year was made up of Ry Arnoldi ’10, Ryan Beck ’10, Brownstein, Byers, Matt Donne ’07, Haley, Jaycox, Erich Klothen ’07, Jaeyoung Lee ’10, Tom Lovett ’08, Molina, Pepi, Siegel-Wallace, Jeff Stein ’08, Dan Storms ’10 and Steve Ranney ’10.
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