Women’s water polo fine-tunes before UCSB Winter Invitational

It’s life in the pool as usual for the UCLA women’s water
polo team this week, as the Bruins will be fine-tuning their skills in preparation for
the UCSB Winter Invitational this weekend. After an impressive start to the season, the Bruins look to stay the course and continue
to emphasize conditioning, defense and teamwork in practice.

The team received a day off for the holiday after starting with a 4-0 record to begin the season, but resumed practice on Tuesday.

Coach Brandon Brooks said he was pleased with the team’s performance last weekend, but believes that practice time is valuable for his players to reach their full potential.

“I didn’t think there were any major holes,” Brooks said of UCLA’s performance over the weekend. “There were a lot of things that were good, but few things that were great.”

Quite a few of the players were sick to begin the new year, but Brooks said that the health of the team has improved significantly, and currently no one has any serious injuries.

In practice this week, freshman utility Mackenzie Barr said she wants to work on her overall effort and focus so that she can sustain a higher intensity level throughout every game.

“I definitely will work on pressing and always maintaining that killer mindset,” Barr said.

As an emerging leader of the team, redshirt junior goalkeeper Sami Hill said the team is prepared to work on different defensive situations as well as some of the fundamentals this week in practice.

“I think we need to work on our five-on-six defense, our shot-blocking and knowing our positions well,” Hill said.

The Bruins showed in their first weekend of play that they could outswim their opponents up and down the pool, but they know once the competition level rises, they will have to be even more prepared.

“We’ve been training really hard, but I think we definitely still have a ways to go before we’re ready for our peak performance,” Barr said.