Team ends successful season with no title

EDWARD LIN/Daily Bruin Senior Staff

Amber Stachowski (left) will be one of many returning players
making the UCLA women’s water polo team an early favorite for
next season.

By Colin Yuhl
Daily Bruin Contributor
[email protected]

What do you say to a team that just lost the national
championship? Nice try? Good effort? For the UCLA women’s
water polo team, the likely answer is “Get ’em next
year.”

The Bruins have that luxury.

Despite losing to arch-rival Stanford in this year’s
national championship, the team had another extremely successful
year. They finished the season as the top-ranked team in the
nation, and beat the Cardinal to win the MPSF conference tournament
for the first time under head coach Adam Krikorian.

“This was a challenging but rewarding season,”
Krikorian said. “We struggled a little bit early in the
season to find our identity as a team. But I think we really
started to come together toward the end of the year.”

UCLA dominated once again, going undefeated against two other
dominant programs in Cal and USC.

Individually, awards are plentiful for both players and coach.
Krikorian was named co-Coach of the Year (along with Long Beach
State’s Ricardo Azevedo). Two Bruins, Robin Beauregard and
Amber Stachowski, were named First Team all-conference, while Jamie
Hipp and Kelly Heuchan were named to the Second Team.

But the same problems that plagued UCLA last year reared their
heads once again.

Injuries, though the team is reluctant to point to them as an
excuse, hampered key players. Beauregard, Hipp, Heuchan and Jessica
Lopez all battled injuries late in the season.

“It seems like the same people are always banged
up,” Lopez said.

Though UCLA had great success against the Bears and Trojans, the
“Curse of the Cardinal” loomed large. The Bruins lost
all three regular season meetings with Stanford this year. In fact,
just like last year, Stanford was the only team to beat UCLA.

It seemed that the curse might have been broken in the
conference tournament, but when Stanford won convincingly in the
NCAA championship game, the Cardinal reasserted their recent
dominance over UCLA.

Still, the Bruins would do well to repeat this season’s
success next year. The return of talented sophomores Thalia Munroe,
Natalie Golda and Lopez, as well as a senior season from the
stellar Beauregard will offset the loss of Heuchan, Jenny Lamb and
Eleanor Murphy to graduation.

Throw in an improved Stachowski, only a freshman and already
considered one of the best players in the world in addition to
three of the top recruits in the nation, and the UCLA women’s
water polo team will clearly be a front-runner for the national
championship again in 2003.