Men’s water polo brings home pair of wins from NorCal

The California and UCLA men’s water polo teams seem to really like spending time together.
For the second time this season, the teams went to overtime as they faced off in Northern California Friday.

And for the second time, the Bruins came away victorious.

UCLA men’s water polo notched two wins this weekend with victories over California and UC Davis.
Although they came away with the victories the result wasn’t quite what the Bruins would normally hope for ““ they took a one-goal win in sudden death over the Bears and allowed Aggies to score eight times.

UCLA has allowed more than six goals nine times this season. The Bruins have often held that six is the limit they set for themselves in terms of a safe amount of goals to concede.

“It all stems from training but what really needs to happen is to come out with more energy and focus. We prepare, it just takes us being a tight group and settling down,” said sophomore attacker Paul Reynolds.

The place where coach Adam Wright sees those goals coming from is the team’s transition play.
“We’re giving them opportunities, the transition is where we need to get better. We’ll work on it the rest of the year but the next few weeks are important,” Wright said.

The game against Cal was especially back and forth, as UCLA came back from an early defecit to tie up the game, but allowed the Bears to catch up to them multiple times during overtime.

It took a sudden-death goal from senior utility Josh Samuels to secure the win for the Bruins.

“I think it took us being a real team to come back. It’s been a consistent pattern for us to fall early, that’s just not the way we want to do things,” Reynolds said.

The main issue as Reynolds sees it is inconsistency in their play. Although they have problems, he said he believes that his team has overall been extremely successful this season.

“We’ve done a heck of a job this season, we’re just having some inconsistency. … It’s not all that negative, it’s not that we’re playing bad,” Reynolds said.

While this weekend might not have been perfect, they still managed to get the win. Coming out of last weekend, when they had a disappointing third-place finish after an upset loss against UC Santa Barbara, UCLA was happy to right some of its previous wrongs.

“This week we got into some of those same situations we got last weekend, but we managed to break out of them this time,” Wright said.

For UCLA, when they’re on their game and it’s all going well ““ it’s just about cutting down the negatives.

“We’re just having spurts of good moments and spurts of bad,” Reynolds said. “We just need to cut down on the bad ones.”

Compiled by Emma Coghlan, Bruin Sports senior staff.