FratHouseSports

It was a pretty regular weekend in the water where all the good teams dominated and the lower ranked teams got beat…here is a quick run through of the headlines. Kally Lucas scored 4 as #1 USC owned on #7 Arizona State 14-5. #2 Stanford rolled #5 Hawaii 10-6 behind Kelly Eaton’s 4 goals to stay perfect in league play. While #4 Cal extended its win streak to 9 by beating both LMU (11-3) and UCSD (17-5) over the weekend. And to round out the top 5, fifth ranked UCLA won 7-5 over San Diego State.

USC has been the #1 team like all year and the only other team to hold the #1 spot has been Stanford who is currently the #2 team in the country having suffered their only loss of the season at the  hands of USC earlier on in the season. We’ve been waiting and waiting for a rematch between the two and just about 2 weeks (April 24th) we’ll get just that.

In the meantime both teams continue to sharpen their skills and beat-up on the competition. This weekend USC won a total of 3 games over ranked opponents by an average of 12 goals; defeating (20) Brown 15-6, (19) Cal State Bakersfield 18-4, and (10) Cal State Northridge 18-6. Look below for more recaps, including news on the game of the weekend.

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The #4 UCLA Bruins had a chance to dethrone the #2 Stanford Cardinals on Saturday, but failed miserably. Stanford won easily by a score of 11-6, with 4 of those goals coming from Melissa Seidemann. But on the bright side at least UCLA didn’t lose to the Cardinal 9-1 like Long Beach State did yesterday and they did turn around and get a win over #6 San Jose State 12-5. A San Jose State team that had the worst weekend of the top 10 teams not only losing one to UCLA, but one to lower ranked LMU 12-11.

Most of the top teams have had last week off for finals or Spring Break, but there were two noteworthy games this past weekend and they were both involving #6 Arizona State. On Saturday the Sun Devils played 7th ranked San Jose State and lost 8-7 and then on Sunday they played 2nd ranked Stanford and lost 12-6.

Starting Friday we’ll have some good games between a few teams in the top 10 so we’ll have a preview along with the latest rankings coming towards the end of the week.

While the top 2 teams (USC and Stanford) didn’t play this weekend, there was still plenty of action in the water with a few top 20 teams squaring off. The most impressive team of the weekend was 3rd ranked Cal who went 4-0 with wins over #14 San Diego State (10-4), #20 Princeton (13-4), Marist (11-0), and Maryland (14-1) at the at the Aztec Invitational.

And although they didn’t play as many games #4 ranked UCLA looked just as good notching wins over #6 Arizona State 13-6 and #13 UCI 8-5. The player of the week goes to Priscilla Orozco who scored 4 goals in each of the matches.

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#6 Arizona State’s Marathon Day: On Saturday the Sun Devil Water Polo team played 3 games, scored 46 goals, and beat two teams ranked in the to 20. First they disposed of #10 Northridge 10-8 in the morning, then smashed #19 Cal State East Bay 20-2 in the afternoon, before finishing things off with a 16-1 dusting of unranked Whittier in the evening.

#5 Hawaii Upsets #3 UCLA: It took 6 OT’s to do it, but the Rainbow Warriors finally got the job done thanks to a sudden death goal by Monika Eggens. But the game ball goes to her sister, Carmen Eggens who had 5 goals right before she got ejected in the 1st OT.

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The UCI Invitational aka the best women’s water polo tournament of the year went down this past weekend. Out of the 16 teams that were in the tournament 14 of them were already in the top 20 in the rankings…including the entire top 10. This was like seeing a preview of the Water Polo NCAA Tournament a full 2 months early.

But unlike the NCAA Basketball Tournament there were no Cinderella stories in this Tournament. After 30 games in less than 48 hours, the top 2 teams (#1 Stanford and #2 USC) were left to battle it out to see who would be the early favorite to take home one title. And while in the final the Trojans ended up beating the #1 Cardinal squad 10-6 and handing them their first loss of the season, that wasn’t the match of the weekend.

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