Team 8: The Mentors
(8.) Tomas Perrone, attacker, Cal. Last year I took Ben Liechty and Brendon Gyapjas with the No. 8 and 9 picks and I was hoping they would be available again this year. However, Liechty is already off the board and Gyapjas is redshirting. Perrone, one of the best players on Spain’s 20u team, was affected by an injury during the 2025 season but I think he will have a great year for Cal this year.
(11.) Aran Pina, goalie, Cal. Pina, Tomas Perrone’s teammate at Cal and on Spain’s 20u team, broke his hand towards the end of the 2025 season but still had an excellent freshman year, earning honorable mention All-American honors. With 9 participants in our draft this year, Gyapjas redshirting, and UCLA’s uncertain goalie situation, I took Pina with the 11th pick because there may not be a really good goalie left by the time I pick again.
(26.) Samu Biros, attacker, San Jose State. Biros was a 2nd team All-American last year, leading SJSU in scoring with 57 goals. He’s a solid all-around player.
(29) Gabi Acosta, center, LBSU. Acosta, entering his junior year at LBSU, was the Big West Player of the Year in 2024 and 2025. He has scored 132 goals in his two years at LBSU, was a 2nd team All-American in 2024, and was an honorable mention All-American in 2025. Acosta was a teammate of Tomas Perrone and Aran Pina on Spanish age-group national teams.
(44.) Taylor Bell, attacker, Princeton. Brett Ormsby, Bell’s coach at JSerra, swears by Bell. In Bell’s freshman year at Princeton in 2025, he was NWPC Rookie of the Year and an honorable mention All-American. He scored 58 goals, recorded 43 assists and 29 steals, and won 28 of his 32 sprints.
(47.) Tyler Anderson, LH center, USC. I’m going to play with two centers–one right-handed and one left-handed. RH Gabi Acosta is more of a finesse player than the powerful LH Anderson. Marko Pintaric thinks Anderson could/should be on the 2028 Olympic team. Anderson and Bell were teammates at JSerra.
(62.) Kirk Everist, coach, Cal. Everist, the best high school player in the country in 1984 and the best college player in 1988, is a 2x NCAA champion as a player, a 6x NCAA champion as a coach, a 2x Olympian, and a member of the Water Polo Hall of Fame as a player. In the NCAA era of men’s water polo (1969 to the present), only Everist and Adam Wright deserve to be inducted into the Hall of Fame as a player and a coach. Everist played for a Hall-of-Fame coach at Miramonte (Bill Brown), three at the Concord Water Polo Club (Pete Cutino, Ron Richison, and Steve Heaston), two at Cal (Cutino and Heaston), one at the 1992 Olympics (Bill Barnett), and one at the 1996 Olympics (Rich Corso). Through it all, he learned one lesson well from Brown and Cutino: If you want to build and maintain a great program, it really helps to make it “cool” to play water polo and to give your players some freedom while they are in and out of the pool. Everist coaches my first two picks (Tomas Perrone and Aran Pina) at Cal and, as someone who played some center at Miramonte and Cal, will know what to do with the two gifted centers I drafted.
(65.) Cole Francisco, center defender, U.C. Irvine. Like Oldschoolpolofan’s choice at center defender (Princeton’s Gavin Appeldorn), Francisco is a jack-of-all-trades player. Partly out of necessity, Francisco will play a significant percentage of his minutes during the 2026 college season as a center defender, as he did during this summer’s Senior Nationals and National League competition. Francisco has good size at 6’5" and will be one of UCI’s leading scorers. He has the ability to score from inside and outside, a skill many modern-day center defenders lack.
H17Polo is on the clock, followed by Trevor and sbwp.
To keep the draft moving, I will make my end-of-season predictions after the draft has concluded.