UCLA men’s water polo to face USC Thursday after 2-win weekend

Paul Pickell said that Senior Day was a little strange. The feeling that time had gone by so quickly was incredible, he said – even emotional.

But then the whistle blew to start the game, and the senior attacker forgot his emotions.

Concentrating solely on the game at hand, Pickell, along with the rest of the UCLA men’s water polo team, defeated UC Santa Barbara 10-7 at home on Sunday. One day earlier UCLA defeated Pepperdine 10-8 in Malibu, Calif.

On Sunday, despite the close scores, the team spouted positives about its gameplay.

The game against Pepperdine was rough, according to the team. In a “classic” game of starting off strong but letting its guard down, according to coach Adam Wright, the team could not widen the 5-2 spread in the score at the start of the second quarter. Instead, “careless play” allowed Pepperdine to trim the lead and eventually score eight goals – two past UCLA’s personal objective of holding every team to six goals or fewer.

“The bad is, we didn’t play great,” Pickell said, laughing.

But both Wright and Pickell saw a positive in UCLA’s resilience against Pepperdine. UCLA was “put on the stand” and had to act, according to Pickell, and Wright saw experiential value in this.

“At halftime I told the guys, ‘Look, you got yourselves into this, now you’ve got to find your way out of it,'” Wright said. “Really for a team like us that’s playing so many freshman, it’s good to go through those situations. I can guarantee you we’re going to see those situations again.”

Sunday’s game against the Gauchos was better, according to the players.

The Bruins had been working on their zone attack, which senior defender Chris Wendt said was strong. Additionally, although UCSB started off with strong energy, scoring the first few goals, UCLA caught up, scoring four straight goals after trailing 2-3 in the first quarter.

“Definitely for the rest of the games we need to work on not letting teams get hot and limiting them to one goal at a time,” Wendt said.

In this game, redshirt freshman goalkeeper Garrett Danner earned a career-high 14 saves. Score aside, “great” 5-on-6 man-down stops along with impressive shots on behalf of the Bruins are significant, according to Wright.

“These are big things, these are big moments for down the road,” Wright said.

The weekend’s successes meant that, with parents filling the stands, the seniors could end Senior Day reflecting on their time at UCLA before facing USC at home on Thursday.

“We have a really good freshman class that is playing a lot and fitting in well with the team. And the sophomores and juniors are all good guys,” Wendt said. “I love everyone on the team.”