The hay is in the barn.
There isn’t much the No. 3 Cal men’s water polo team can do in preparation for this weekend’s MPSF tournament. The team has practiced all it can and knows what it does best. The Bears (20-3, 7-1 MPSF) faced every conference rival at least once in the last three months and anticipate whatever attacks will come their way.
The strategies are perfected. The record is set. The hay is in the barn.
At this point, all Cal can do is play. Play with the same fire that consumed the athletes last weekend, when an explosive defense thrashed No. 4 Stanford by one of the widest margins in the last 20 Big Splashes.
“We saw that if we play like a team, we play well,” senior attacker Luka Saponjic said. “We are capable to win every game. But we also forget that game after. We play game by game, and at the end we’ll see results.”
That focus is necessary for this weekend’s performances. The team opens the tournament against seven-seed UC Irvine on Friday at 11:30 a.m at UCLA’s Spieker Aquatics Center. To start, that’s the only game the team is focused on.
They’ve already topped the Anteaters (15-11, 2-6) once this season by an eight-goal margin. If the squad earns a win this time as well, then it moves on to face either No. 1 UCLA or No. 7 Pacific the following afternoon. Nab a second win and Cal makes it to the MPSF final on Sunday at 3 p.m.
Should the Bears win the conference title, they will receive an automatic berth to the NCAA Championship. Cal wants the guarantee that comes with the conference title, but at this point in the season there’s a more pressing desire driving the team forward.
“The conference title is big, but the national title is what these guys have been battling for,” Everist said. “I’d rather give up the conference title and have the national title.”
Should the Bears win two games this weekend, they would beat out the Bruins (one game behind Cal) and the Cardinal (three games behind) for that at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament, to be held Dec. 3-4 at Cal’s Spieker Aquatics Center.
The Bears tread a fine line between tunnel vision and the bigger picture. They know what is at stake based off this weekend’s results, but they can’t afford to fixate solely on that. Senior attacker Cory Nasoff said that the team hasn’t even begun to seriously think about the NCAA’s yet. The squad refuses to lose focus on this weekend by looking ahead to the next.
“If we don’t perform at this tournament, then the NCAA’s don’t happen,” senior utility Zach Greenwood said.
They will take it one day at a time — play with “cautious optimism,” as Everist defines it.
This weekend, the Bears will play for security.
The team wholly believes that it controls its own destiny. Nasoff echoed that when he said that without a “sense of urgency … we don’t have control of the season.”
Only after the Bears make it to the final round will they being to play for glory.