Final Four Berth At Stake for M. Water Polo Team

Two weekends ago the men’s water polo team earned third place at the Northern Championships at Brown University. This weekend the team hopes to do even better as it heads to Princeton for the Eastern Championships.

If the Crimson (23-9 overall, 7-3 Collegiate Water Polo Association) wins this weekend’s tournament, it will go to the Final Four at Stanford the weekend of Dec. 8.

“This is the first time we legitimately have a shot at winning Easterns,” said junior driver Theo Ludwick.

Harvard has had a remarkable year. In the Northern Division Tournament, the Crimson beat the University of Massachusetts for the first time in at least five years.

The Crimson’s weekend will begin with a game tomorrow afternoon against Navy. Harvard lost to Navy 10-5 on Sept. 29, but has come a long way since the match.

“When we played Navy the first time, we didn’t show them what we can do,” Ludwick said.

The game against Navy was not the Crimson’s best showing of the season, but Harvard hopes to have different results this time.

“That is going to be a really big game,” junior driver Istvan Zollei said. “It’s going to be personal. We really want to beat them.”

If Harvard is able to overcome Navy, tomorrow night it will play the winner of a match between Queens and Johns Hopkins. The Crimson has had mixed results against both teams this season, most recently suffering a 5-4 loss to Queens two weekends ago at Brown.

Interestingly, if Harvard and UMass each win their first two games of the tournament, they could end up playing each other in the championship game on Sunday.

It would be the fifth time that the two teams have squared off this season.

“We have to put three really good games together to win,” Zollei said. “It is not enough to just play really well in one game; we have to play three really hard games.”

The team will benefit from that fact that is has had two weeks to recover and work on the mistakes made in previous tournaments.

“We have never looked as sharp as we do now,” Zollei added. “The intensity is extremely high. Being in the pool with my teammates feels awesome. …Everyone is on the same page.”

Over the course of the season, different Harvard players have suffered some minor injuries, but almost everyone on the team is well again and will be able to play this weekend. Only freshman Mike Gerrity remains out with a punctured eardrum.

“We’re really ready to go for it,” Ludwick said. “We’ve been fine-tuning things.”