Men’s water polo retains No. 1 ranking with wins against Pepperdine, LMU
Roberts set a career-high of seven goals and gave No. 1 UCLA an 18-8 victory over No. 9 Pepperdine. The Bruins improve to 13-0. (Keila Mayberry/Daily Bruin)
By Savannah Shapiro
Oct. 5, 2015 9:52 a.m.
With a little over three minutes left to play in the fourth quarter, junior attacker Ryder Roberts was still looking to add to UCLA’s nine-goal lead.
Not looking to stop with the six goals that he already tallied up in the previous three quarters, Roberts sent a shot past Pepperdine’s goalkeeper Zack Rhodes.
Hitting the back of the net, Roberts set a career-high of seven goals and gave No. 1 UCLA an 18-8 victory over No. 9 Pepperdine in the remaining minutes of the fourth quarter.
“In practice all week we’ve worked a lot on shooting and the centers holding deep in position and coming back into the zone,” Roberts said. “They did their job … I did mine, and it worked out well.”
Eight Bruins were able to find the net against the Waves, with both Roberts and sophomore attacker Max Irving scoring more than half the goals for UCLA. Irving was able to complete a hat trick in the third period.
“The way our team works is we all have a system that we all play around,” said junior defender Chancellor Ramirez. “It doesn’t revolve around one person on the team, we have multiple threats and we don’t have one dominant goal scorer. Everyone on our team can score.”
Junior goalkeeper Garrett Danner had a total of 10 saves with six steals against Pepperdine. Danner kept the Waves scoreless in the fourth quarter and and limited them to single-digit scoring.
“Garrett is incredible and he saves us a lot,” Roberts said. “It doesn’t matter what other teams are doing because Garrett is going to eat them up as long as we give the other team a shot we want them to take.”
UCLA showed dominance in its 6-on-5 power plays, converting four out of the five opportunities. Pepperdine was unable to convert on multiple 6-on-5 opportunities, which were stopped by UCLA’s prevailing defense. On the 17 exclusions, the Waves were only able to convert four attempts.
“Seventeen exclusions is way too many for us,” Roberts said. “We need to work on adjusting to the way the game is being officiated. We need to learn how to change the way we are playing on defense, showing more hands, being clean. That’s one thing we need take away from the game.”
Unlike the offensive explosiveness that was present at the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation opener against Pepperdine, the opening pace was slower against No. 19 Loyola Marymount University in the first quarter.
The Bruins scored three goals in the first quarter with the Lions trailing close behind with two goals.
“Sometimes games like that just happen where your offense is not clicking,” Roberts said. “That’s why we always fall back on our defense and pull us out of situations where our offense isn’t scoring as many goals as it normally does.”
The Bruins never trailed throughout the matchup and were able to outscore the Lions in three of the four quarters. However, UCLA was not as strong as the day before on its 6-on-5 opportunities converting three for eight of the power plays.
“In that game we were able to see how far our defense has come,” Ramirez said. “We still have a lot of work to do, but it’s good to know that the projection cannot be in our favor, but we can still pull out a game with a win.”
Danner had a similar day in the cage against Loyola registering 14 saves in the three quarters played, while freshman goalkeeper Alex Wolf took over in the cage for the remaining time in the fourth quarter. Wolf registered one save and conceded a goal to Loyola Marymount.
UCLA sealed a 13-6 victory and still remains undefeated in the regular season.
“We had a couple mental lapses in the beginning of the game, but were able to catch ourselves quickly and finish out a good game,” Ramirez said.
The two wins this weekend kept the Bruins in the No. 1 spot in the NCAA polls and gave them a 1-0 record in the MPSF play.
