By Joann Groff
Assistant Sports Editor
The chance has passed for the 2002 Pepperdine men’s water polo team, but the dream will remain alive, for there are those who will try again next year at the possibility of claiming the NCAA crown.
The Waves ended their season with a crushing 9-8 loss to UC Berkeley in the championship game of the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation tournament. The loss not only cost the top-ranked Waves the tournament, but their ticket to the NCAA National Championships, a tournament that arguably would have been significantly less challenging and given the Waves a nearly assumable national championship.
The MPSF, the men’s water polo conference, is made up of the best teams in the nation. When a team wins the MPSF title, it has virtually proven a national No. 1 ranking. When Berkeley beat Pepperdine, it automatically earned its national championship berth, and Stanford was chosen as the No. 2 team from the MPSF based on, among other things, overall record. Stanford and Berkeley ended up battling it out for the championship, Stanford claiming the 7-6 victory.
Since the NCAA began naming a national champion in 1969, the winner has always been a member of the MPSF conference, Pepperdine’s 1997 program being one of them.
The 2002 season promised to be their next, but after the bitter loss, the players say they look to put the past behind them.
“It wasn’t what we were looking for,” sophomore two-meter man Jesse Smith said. “We could have done a lot of things better, but we’re positive we can come back next year, learn from this experience and really finish strong. This year we did well, but next year we have to win the little games, the easy games, to better our record for NCAA.”
The game started off tight from the minute the ball went into play. At the half, the score showed a 5-5 tie. Immediately after the intermission, Smith scored to give Pepperdine a 6-5 lead. Berkeley rallied back with three goals, leaving the score at 8-6. The Waves tried to recover, and came close to it, but the clock ran out with Berkeley one point ahead.
“We all were disappointed by the Berkeley game,” Smith said. “We played really well at some points, but it just didn’t go our way.”
Smith led the Waves’ offense with four goals, while senior Karl Niehaus and juniors Jeremy Grubbs, Scott Harvey and Michael Hausmann each tallied one goal.
Smith was named first-team All-American by the Collegiate Water Polo Association at the conclusion of the season, after scoring 65 goals for the Waves. He recorded 42 last year as a freshman, second only to graduated superstar Greg Lonzo.
Smith will have two more years to achieve his often expressed goals of a national championship, a feat Pepperdine has only accomplished once before. The five seniors who are set to graduate in April will not be so lucky.
“The results were disappointing,” Niehaus said. “It left this empty feeling. I can’t say we’ll work harder next year, because for some of us there is no next year.”
Niehaus was an offensive powerhouse last season, tallying 37 goals as the team’s second-leading scorer.
Many of the men who finished their career with the 2002 season were key players on the team, making it all the more difficult to focus on another year. Goalie Michael Soltis recorded 351 saves in the last two years of his career at Pepperdine.
The Waves finished the season 16-10, claiming the MPSF regular season championship with a conference record of 7-1. They were named the No. 3 team in the nation in the final American Water Polo Coaches Association pool. Some say that just wasn’t good enough.
“Overall it was a frustrating season,” Niehaus said. “We proved to be a very good team, but a very inconsistent team as well. We could play with the best and then go and lose to the worst team. We didn’t lift ourselves to our highest level of play at every single game. There could have been a different end to the story if we had.”
January 16, 2003