Here are my predictions, often wrong, for the CWPA tournament:
(1.) Princeton. Princeton, Harvard, and Michigan could win the tournament and earn the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. Princeton beat Michigan by one during the regular season and lost to Harvard by three. Michigan beat Harvard by one. I’m picking Princeton to win but it won’t surprise me if Harvard or Michigan wins. Princeton has the CWPA player of the year (Los Alamitos’s Shanna Davidson) and the CWPA newcomer of the year (Corona del Mar’s Didi Evans). Davidson, Miramonte’s Lindsey Lucas, and Mater Dei’s Olivia Krotts earned 1st team All-CWPA honors. Lucas, one of the top 3 or 4 goalies in the country, has won the CWPA player-of-the-week award 27 times, more than any other female or male water polo player. Davidson has already recorded 76 assists.
(2.) Harvard. Harvard has had a good season. As the No. 1 seed, they have an easier road to the finals than Princeton and Michigan. Sophomore Orli Cooper, from North Carolina, is a good goalie. Dos Pueblos’s Emma Gilbert and Long Beach Wilson’s Maya O’Dea earned 1st team All-CWPA honors. Ted Minnis was named the CWPA coach of the year.
(3.) Michigan. Michigan will play the conference tournament at its home pool. They have had a more difficult schedule than Princeton and Harvard. Greece’s Ari Karampetsou and Greenwich’s Emma Gustafson earned 1st team All-CWPA honors.
(3.) Brown. Brown finished the regular season 13-11, losing to Princeton, Harvard, and Michigan. Newport Harbor’s Courtney Love earned 1st team All-CWPA honors.
Here are my predictions for the Golden Coast Conference Tournament:
LMU. I can’t remember the last time the No. 1 seed in a conference tournament had just one player on the all-conference 1st team and the No. 2 seed had three.
Fresno State. Fresno State has had an up-and-down season. On a good day, they can beat LMU.
San Diego State. SDSU has had a pretty good season, led by GCC player-of-the-year Mimi Stoupas and 1st team all-conference attacker Claudia Valdes.
Cal Baptist. The first-round game between Cal Baptist and Pacific could go either way.
Emily Ausmus is the MPSF player-of-the-year, Despoina Drakotou is the newcomer-of-the-year, and Casey Moon is the coach-of-the-year. I’m surprised Juliette Dhalluin wasn’t named to the all-conference first team.
Congrats to all the athletes-it’s been a fun season…
Jeff-I never quite realized, until looking at this list, how many foreign players there were on the women’s team. Is this new ? I’m used to it on the mens side, but for some reason I assumed the women’s teams had less.
Internationals have been 2x+ overrepresented on all conference and Cutino watch lists. That’s out of equilibrium and suggests more internationals are on the way at least at programs focused on winning.
The yield of HS players who play college polo is actually lower than for women’s field hockey or lacrosse. So - I think you’re just saying that international players are better than US players outside the top 25 or so US players? If so, agreed.
Put differently, the problem isn’t that mid tier college coaches can’t fill rosters with US, it’s that they can’t do that and compete with teams that fill rosters with internationals.
I agree, also the transfer portal is overwhelming a one-way street.
Kids that ride the bench at the big-4 don’t leave, but the best kids at the mid majors will transfer to the big 4
Ex: Bia, Nina Flynn, Dahlioun (spelling?),
Give a kid a choice between Cal and LB or USC and Irvine and it’s always the Big 4 that gets the kid. The men seem to have a more active transfer portal, where guys will leave the likes of a UCLA to go to a Pepperdine or a similar school and see more minutes, but the women’s game isn’t there (yet?).
Maybe there’s hope, GCC newcomer of the year is a Cal Baptist sophomore center who was at Cal last year, seems to have found success (and more minutes) at her new home.
The Stanford/UCLA game was one of the better games that I have seen this year. The goalies were exceptional. Both teams had multiple chances to end the game, but could not put it away. Stanford won in sudden death on a 5M, the fifth that they drew against UCLA.
Cal lost another close came to one of the Big 3. It will be interesting to see if they can get over the hump tomorrow against UCLA. They can certainly score goals, but their defense has really struggled this year
The Stanford/USC game tomorrow should be a great one. I think that a key will be if Stanford’s Browne can stay out of foul trouble and if their centers can force USC to drop on them and open things up for their outside shooters.
18 saves v 7 goals allowed in a 6 OT CWPA championship game to repeat for Harvard. Two of Princeton’s top scorers went 0 for 11 and 0 for 7. One of the great goalie performances in recent memory.
Between rain showers there were another two great games at Spieker today. UCLA held in to beat Cal 10-9 and Stanford outscored USC 6-2 in the to come back and win 16-14.
Congratulations to Harvard for their back to back CWPA Championship and an automatic bid to the the NCAAs.
There was definitely some great goalie play this weekend. As mentioned, Cooper had an superb game and it looks like Lucas was solid as well. UCLA’s Steele had 20 saves yesterday against Stanford’s outstanding shooters who put up 16 on USC today and held Cal’s high scoring offense to 9 today.
