Men’s water polo defeats USC to win NorCal Invite

UCLA men’s water polo will admit that it’s always a good feeling to beat USC – especially in the final game of the NorCal Invitational.

“But it’s just the beginning of the season,” said redshirt junior utility Cristiano Mirarchi. “We have to improve a lot if we want to keep winning.”

The Bruins, now 11-0, won all four of their games, and consequently the NorCal Invitational, on Saturday and Sunday.

And while the first two games against Concordia University and UC Santa Barbara were 17-4 and 10-4 victories, respectively, the semifinal game against California and final game against USC sported bottlenecked scores against the tougher opponents.

Additionally, the victory over USC left the Trojans 11-1, ending a streak of 41 consecutive victories dating back to 2011.

Calling the victory a “good start,” however, coach Adam Wright still found room for improvement amid the successes.

Wright noted that the 6-on-5 power play attacks in both the semifinal and final games were “not good at all.” Additionally, Wright felt the team’s 5-on-6 defense allowed too many goals.

“If we don’t clean that up it’s gonna come back to hurt us,” Wright said. “We have a long ways to go.”

Junior attacker Paul Reynolds agreed that despite the good results of the weekend, the defense needed fixing.

“We lost some good guys last year. We have the talent but putting the team together is hard,” Reynolds said.

For Lovre Milos, though, it’s significant that the team is winning. Rather than seeing flaws in his own or his teammates’ playing, the freshman attacker said that the team improved from the beginning to the end of the tournament, despite facing increasingly tougher competition. Wright could only agree with these sentiments.

“As you go further along in a tournament the games become tougher and tougher, but for me the big thing is we have a lot and a lot of new pieces,” Wright said. “We’re a long ways from where we need to be, but we’re able to walk away with a good result.”