Sports

With three losses to the top three teams, Cal’s men’s water polo’s national title hopes might already be on the ropes.

No. 4 Cal (7-3, 0-1) even began the season with concerns. The team lost some crucial seniors on offense, such as attackers Ivan Rackov and Luka Saponjic. Rackov was Cal’s top scorer last year, with 70 goals, and a finalist for the Peter J. Cutino Award. Saponjic was the Bears’ second leading scorer with 41 goals and was an honorable mention All-American.

Even without Rackov and Saponjic, the remaining players still have a top finish in mind.

“We come from the most storied program from water polo,” team captain Marin Balarin said before the NorCal tournament. “If we don’t’ get first, it’s a disappointing year and that’s how we go into every tournament and year.”

That insistence to be the best paid early dividends. In its first games at the Princeton Invitational in early September, the team dominated their competition for a 5-0 start. Through the entire tournament, the Bears only allowed 4.25 goals per match while scoring an average of 16.25 goals.

With momentum riding high, the Bears began to see the first drops in their roller-coaster season.

Head coach Kirk Everist announced Monday, Sept. 17 that five players were removed from the team for violating a code of conduct policy. Everist did not specify what the violation was, and he did not allow them to to play in the Sept. 15-16 NorCal Invitational.

The biggest loss among the five removed players was starting goalie and team captain Justin Parsons. The second team All-American had been the Bears’ 2011 co-MVP and had accumulated 473 career saves.

With the removal, Cal lost four additional attackers and hurt an already depleted offense. Max Bergeson, for example, was a valuable left-handed attacker, with 15 goals in his 2010 campaign.

“Those guys will be missed,” senior team captain Marin Balarin said following Everist’s announcement. “Those guys were our teammates and our friends, but we have to keep moving on.”

Early in the NorCal tournament, that seemed true. The Bears asserted their dominance over No. 16 Air Force and No. 6 Irvine in the first two rounds, winning 19-2 and 14-7, respectively.

But against top-tiered competition, the Bears faltered. They dropped an 11-10 game against No. 2 UCLA, then lost the third place match against then-No. 4 Stanford, 9-8.

The following weekend, the team followed up the tournament with another difficult loss to No. 1 USC, 7-6, in a match that Cal controlled until the final few minutes.

Thus far, the three defeats this year and the seven last year have all come from those three schools. They have also all been one-goal losses.

“It’s a one-goal game here or there and somebody has to make a play,” Everist said. “We have to execute more and capitalize on every situation.”

Despite the losses both in the pool and on the team, prospects for the Bears are bright.

Sophomore All-American Aleksa Saponjic, who brought home a bronze for Serbia in the 2012 London Olympics, already has 13 goals in only 7 appearances. Redshirt freshman Colin Mulcahy has 14 goals to his name in his first 10 collegiate games.

Both players are expected to figure heavily in the upcoming SoCal Invitational, which will bring together the same top-tier teams that Cal lost to last week. If the Bears want to re-establish their dominance, the younger players will have to continue their high scoring.

“Cal has always had great players, and you don’t just replace them,” Everist said before the start of the season. “But new players will step up, and I expect nothing less from the younger kids that’ll be here this year.”

Vincent Tzeng covers men’s water polo. Contact him at [email protected]

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