Bear Polo Out of Tournament

Losing 7-11 to Loomis Chaffee last Saturday in its big qualifying game, Big Red boys’ water polo failed to qualify for the annual New England interschols. The boys were extremely disappointed by their performance, for the loss now leaves the team at a 7-7 season record, the worst for Bear Polo in a decade.

Although the team has had a difficult season, the players went into the match with high hopes for a comeback in light of the progress they’ve made in the past few weeks. From the beginning of the season to now, Bear Polo has transformed from an unusually young and inexperienced team of individual athletes to a technical and powerful unit. Yet, Loomis Chaffee proved to be an opponent stronger that the team—the structure of the team broke down, and its weaknesses were exposed and exploited by the enemy squad, resulting in a crushing loss.

Upper John Wang said, “I’m proud of the way our team improved over the season. Unfortunately, we struggled to put it all together in the pool against our opponents."

Lower Taylor Walshe described the game as frustrating for “it was like almost every other game this season.” He said that Loomis Chaffee was a team that Exeter could have beaten, but the team failed to gain momentum during the match and surpass the opponent’s drive. According to Walshe, “hardly anybody [on the team] brought his A game.”

After the first quarter, Big Red was down 1-4. From there on, the score differential remained mostly the same. The boys had let Loomis Chaffee slip ahead early on and could do nothing but try to trail behind Loomis Chaffee’s tail afterwards. Each goal the boys had, Loomis Chaffee matched it. In addition, the team’s regular scorers failed to pull through when the team needed them most. Although the boys fought valiantly with great intensity after the first quarter in an effort to catch up, they had handicapped themselves from the start, and they paid for it. “We played to the best of our ability, but we couldn’t pull out a win,” senior and co-captain Ernesto Brown said.

Wang echoed Brown’s comments. “We played hard until the end, but a few calls and bounces didn’t go our way.”

Although in that sense, the game against Loomis Chaffee was reminiscent of previous games of this season, the unusual and unfortunate aspect of this match was that it knocked Big Red out of Interschols, the tournament the team had been looking forward to all season. During the past few years, the team has consistently placed in the top three at Interschols. To not even qualify this year has been a huge upset for the team.

Furthermore, to compound the team’s frustration, for the first time in several years, Interschols are being held at Exeter on Nov. 14 during the Exeter/andover (E/a) games. The boys had been looking forward to playing at home for once and receiving a lot of home support in line with the hype of E/a.

Despite these many disappointments, the team hopes to regroup and pick itself up over the next week. Instead of moping around because of its loss, the boys hope to look toward the future and showcase their resilience. “The team is demoralized after this loss as it takes us out of the tournament. [But] we have two more games left, and we hope to finish on high note,” Walshe said.

The boys will be seeking a comeback this Saturday in their last home game of the season against Boston Metro. While Exonians will not be able to cheer the team on at Interschols, the boys hope to see a lot of home support at this last game. The home game is at 2:00 this Saturday, Nov. 7.