In his final regular-season match at Canyonview Pool, UCSD senior captain Nate Cooper was honored on Nov. 3 at Senior Night as the only graduating player on the No. 8 Tritons men’s water polo team. Then, as if to make a final impression on the 306 fans in attendance for the match against No. 11 Pepperdine, he led the Tritons offense with a pair of goals. However, the effort was not enough to prevent the visiting Waves from upsetting UCSD, 7-5.
The match opened with a 1-0 shutout first period in the Tritons’ favor. Cooper scored his first late in the quarter, as Pepperdine struggled to get its offense fired up. Unfortunately for UCSD, this did not last beyond the first seven minutes of play. The Waves’ freshman drivers Adam Hewko and Grant Miller tallied back-to-back goals within two minutes of the start of the second quarter, giving their team the 2-1 advantage. But in a quarter that saw six total goals, which knotted the score three times, both teams’ offenses were just getting warmed up.
Triton freshman driver Adnan Jerkovic netted his only score of the game with four minutes, 15 seconds to play in the half, but it took only 19 seconds before Pepperdine sophomore Doug Mann stole the lead back away from the Tritons.
Cooper fired in his second goal of the match just inside the three-minute mark to keep the scoring advantage neutral going into the half, but Pepperdine retaliated swiftly, again taking just 19 seconds to surmount the Triton defense as senior driver Josh Acosta delivered the final score going into the half to maintain a 4-3 advantage over UCSD.
The Waves got on the board first in the second half, as Acosta dropped his second goal of the game into the back of the net in the third minute. With a two-goal buffer and the clock slowly working its way down, Pepperdine appeared to try to slow the tempo of its own offense in order to reduce the number of Triton scoring opportunities. The strategy was successful for the better part of the quarter until UCSD freshman two-meter man Simon Schafer delivered his only goal of the match from the hole, with only 1:12 to play.
From the start of the fourth quarter, the Tritons knew that to win the game and avoid a crushing upset — the team’s fourth consecutive loss and seventh of its last 10 chances — they would need to outscore Pepperdine by one goal to send the game into overtime, or two for the win.
Sophomore utility Jesse Casellini started the Triton drive with the game-tying score less than two minutes into the quarter. But Pepperdine shot back almost instantly, wasting only 30 seconds before avenging Casellini’s goal on a shot by Miller.
The game was sealed in the Waves’ favor at the 3:17 mark as Miller drove in his game-high third score and secured a 7-5 victory.
With the loss, UCSD falls to 18-11 on the season. The Tritons, who struggled at their home pool late in 2004, will take the next two weeks to recuperate and fine-tune their skills in anticipation of the the Western Water Polo Association Champion-ships, which will determine whether the team will earn a berth in the NCAA Final Four Championship at Stanford on Dec. 4 and Dec. 5.
