The deck of Canyonview Pool came to life in the hour before the No. 6 UCSD men’s water polo team’s home game on Oct. 15 against No. 7 Loyola Marymount. The aluminum bleachers filled, the pep band blared, the beer gardens swarmed and the pool rocked tumultuously as the teams prepared to square off against one another in a rematch of the 2003 and 2004 Western Water Polo Association Championship Finals. Despite the roaring, sellout crowd of 1,779, UCSD fell to the Lions, 8-4.
The Tritons came out strong, winning the opening sprint to go first onto offense. After losing the ball on a deflected shot, Triton junior goalie Colin McElroy denied the Lions’ first attempt.
Then came the first signs of trouble for UCSD. A quick turnover resulted in a Loyola Marymount counterattack and shot, which was tipped on its way out by a Triton. Armed with a fresh 35-second shot clock, the Lions mustered their first goal just more than three minutes into the game.
But defense was not where UCSD fell. On the next possession, the Tritons set up their offense and took a shot only to see it blocked; however, a dead-time ejection led to the first of eight, six-on-five opportunities for UCSD. The Tritons failed to convert seven of those chances into goals, costing the usually effective Tritons the potential victory.
Freshman driver Adnan Jerkovic scored the only man-up goal with one minute, 25 seconds remaining in the first quarter on the second UCSD man-up play. Jerkovic’s shot, a bar-in off of the right post and past the Loyola Marymount goalie’s head, was his only score of the match.
“We were one-for-eight on our six-on-fives,” Jerkovic said. “That in itself was the worst thing we could have done.”
To the credit of Loyola Marymount, this game was destined to be a battle between rivals. While the Tritons faltered offensively, the Lions played exceptionally on both ends of the tank. Throughout the game, while the Tritons set up their offense and tried to work the ball into two-meters, Loyola Marymount was crashing hard and fast to force either a shot or a turnover. While on defense, the Tritons tried to do the same thing, but the Lions were still getting effective shots off, despite double coverage.
On offense, even though two-meters was not always the safest place to play the ball, UCSD was struggling to make decent shots from the outside.
“We weren’t shooting well on the outside,” Jerkovic said. “So we kept trying to work it in, but they play a crash defense and have a really good goalie.”
That said, it’s easy to see why the Triton offense never found its rhythm: Two of the team’s four goals were scored on shots taken from the perimeter, while only one was scored from two-meters on a sweep shot by junior two-meter man Chris Finegold. With outside shooters off their mark, two-meters covered and the six-on-five jammed, UCSD might have been lucky to have managed even four goals.
Junior driver Chris Eichholz netted his only goal of the match with 2:20 remaining in the first half on a skip shot that scored in the upper-right corner of the cage.
The Tritons fall to 18-8 with the loss, while the Lions move up to 12-5 Taking this week off, UCSD will return to action at Canyonview Pool on Oct. 24 for a noon match against No. 1 Stanford.
