MACK CARROLL/Staff Photographer
SHUHEI MATSUO
Sports Editor
The Pepperdine water polo team stayed perfect in its home waters at Saturday’s Pepperdine Mini, including a comeback victory during its home opener against cross-town rival Loyola Marymount.
The fifth-ranked Waves won their home opener of the season in Saturday’s first match, when they sank No.-10 LMU 11-9 with an impressive 4-0 comeback in the final quarter.
Pepperdine kept rolling and prevailed Golden West twice with scores of 12-8 and 10-9 in its second and third games, respectively.
After adding the weekend’s three victories to their record, the Waves improved to 15-3 in the 2007 campaign.
Despite a dramatic triumph against LMU, Head Coach Jack Kocur said he was “very disappointed” with his team’s showing to a lower-ranked team.
“I’m happy with the team that we got a victory, but I’m very disappointed in the way we were putting things together,” he said. “We are not playing in all the cylinders. We’ve got to go back to our drawing board individually and step up emotionally, skill wise and all aspect of the game.”
Echoing his coach, attacker Adam Hewko, who scored twice in this match, said not all crew members were on the same page for almost the entire match.
“It’s frustrating, but it’s not discouraging,” he said. “The mistakes we made were good mistakes because we can fix them. It’s not like we can’t go back to the drawing board and figure out what happened.”
Within a minute into the game, LMU scored the first goal at 7:02. Although sophomore attacker JP MacDonell scored two goals in the first quarter, the Lions shook the goal net with one second left to lead with 4-2 after the first eight minutes.
There was not much action in the second quarter with only goal by Pepperdine freshman attacker Caleb Hamilton, who scored at 6:11 to reduce the deficit to just one with 4-3.
The second half brought more excitement and goals for both teams, but the Waves ended the third quarter down 9-7, when the Lions scored their 9th goal with only nine seconds remaining.
With eight more minutes to go in the match, Kocur replaced junior goalie Jack Curley with sophomore Travis Stachowsk, who eventually shut down LMU offense in the forth quarter.
“As long as we didn’t give them any goals in the first part of the fourth quarter, we would have had the whole momentum going into the rest of the quarter,” Stachowski said. “So it was very important to stop them [in the last quarter].”
Stachowski’s impressive three saves brought energy back to Pepperdine’s offense. After junior attacker Grant Miller and sophomore center Clayton Snyder each scored a goal to tie the match, Hamilton slammed a game-winning shot into the LMU’s net with 2:42 remaining. The freshman player said he was a little bit nervous to compete at home for the first time in his college career.
“There was a pretty big crowd,” Hamilton said. “I think we should have beat them by a few more goals, but it was a great game. I’m glad that everyone came out to watch.”
With 1:45 remaining, MacDonell scored another goal to conclude the comeback by Pepperdine.
The Waves played two more games against Golden West later that day and took both of them 12-8 and 10-9. Pepperdine’s B team played the entire first match and most of the second. Golden West made a strong performance in the second match as it led the match until the final two minutes, when Kocur threw back in some of the starting players to bring another comeback win. Freshman Travis Gough led the Waves with five goals in these two games.
Pepperdine is back in action tomorrow when it travels to Claremont, Calif., for the Claremont Convergence.
10-04-2007
