Entering the final weekend of the regular season, the Hopkins water polo team first faced off against George Washington (GW) at home.
“The magnitude of this game was stressed the most,” junior Johnny Beal said. “We knew it was important for our seeding going into the postseason, and this was a must win. GW is one of our biggest rivals and playing them at home in front of a crowd made it an even bigger game, especially because we had lost at their pool in front of a hostile crowd earlier this season.”
The Blue Jays got up early, exiting the first quarter with a 4-1 lead. They carried the momentum into the half, up 9-5. However, that was not enough for sophomore Langdon Froomer.
“There’s definitely a certain sense of pride in playing George Washington,” Froomer said. “It’s always a physical and emotional game so we weren’t satisfied being up four goals. Simply put, we wanted to dominate them, not just beat them.”
The team would have to dominate the rest of the game without its coach, as Head Coach Ted Bresnahan got ejected to begin the third quarter.
“Ted and this ref always have problems so it was a culmination of a bunch of calls,” Froomer said. “He knows [the red card] pumps us up and gets the crowd into it so that gave us all the energy we needed to put them away.”
The Jays would not look back, winning the game 17-10. Senior Stephen Kingery and junior Wes Hopkins led the team with four goals apiece. To his surprise, Beal scored the 100th goal of his career.
“To be honest, I had no idea that it was my 100th goal,” Beal said. “I didn’t find out until that night when I read it on the athletic website. I was just trying to play my game and help the team out any way I could.”
The following day, the Jays were scheduled to play their final two games beginning at Mercyhurst.
“The main goal on Saturday was to get a win against Mercyhurst especially because we had suffered an upset to them last year during our final tournament,” de Lyon said. “Because I wasn’t there for the GW game, I was less fatigued than the rest of the team, so I knew I really needed to give everything I had.”
Although de Lyon and freshman Connor Johnson led the team with two goals each, the Jays would go on to lose the game 11-6.
“Personally, I really hate losing,” de Lyon said. “My personal statistics don’t do anything to remedy the loss. I made plenty of mistakes during the game, and I just try to focus on how to improve from game to game. When it’s all said and done, though, I was just getting ready for the next game.”
According to both (Wes) Hopkins and Henrikson, the game was characterized by missed opportunities.
“I missed two identical shots in a row on the same possession that could have swung the momentum back to us, so for me personally, it was that point that sticks out as the most frustrating,” Hopkins said.
Henrikson would finish the game with 11 saves and a steal, while Beal netted an assist becoming the fourth player in program history to tally 100 goals and 100 assists.
The focus then shifted towards the night game against Navy. Beal, in particular, stressed the final game’s importance.
“It was huge,” Beal said. “It determined our seeding going into playoffs and since we had already beaten them once, we could have clearly been ranked over them for our Southern Championship tournament.”
While the Jays entered the half against Navy tied at four, they could not keep up in the second half, dropping the game 12-8. Again, the loss seemed to revolve around missed opportunities.
Between the fourth quarters of two Saturday games, the Blue Jays were outscored 7-2, suggesting fatigue may have played a role in the losses.
“A major concern with this weekend was that we had not played in a full-size, deep pool in over a month,” de Lyon said. “The last time we had played in one was the weekend against Princeton and Bucknell. Since then, we had been training and playing in a shallow pool, which is, frankly, a totally different sport. It was just the nature of our schedule that really led to us being unprepared for the fitness aspect of the game, but we’ll be ready for playoffs.”
Henrikson saved 10 shots and had four steals, while Hopkins led the team with two goals.
With the Southern Division Championship beginning Nov. 8 at Navy, the Blue Jays will look to make a deep playoff push.
“If we can manage to win [the first round] game and one more, we could contend for the Southern Division championship and get ourselves in a good position to do some damage at Easterns,” Hopkins said. “All the teams are so evenly matched that really anything could happen this year.”
