10/10/24 Highlight: Boys’ Varsity Water Polo

By SAM ALTMAN, , LUKE CHON, AMERSON LIANG, and AALIYAH SALVA

On Saturday, October 5th, the varsity boys water polo team competed in the Cardinal Cup, hosted in Greenwich, Connecticut. Out of the five games played, the team won three, including a close loss to a talented club team, CT Premier. Overall, the team placed 5th.

Lower Henry Wise discussed the team’s expectations going into the tournament. “We went to this tournament last year, and we pretty much had a similar outcome. We weren’t expecting to win, but we were expecting to do better this year,” he said.

“It was a bit of a tough schedule because we had a lot of games back-to-back and there was a lot of travel involved, so we were a bit tired playing our games,” prep Owen Lee mentioned.

“On Friday, we had a NEPSAC League game against Greenwich Country Day School, which we won by maybe 10 points. We had a tournament game later that day, and then on Saturday, we had three more tournament games,” Wise added.

Upper Andrew Gao also mentioned Greenwich Country Day. “One game that we won was against Greenwich Country Day School, and in that one, we won by quite a bit. Overall, we played a lot of tough teams with a lot of D1 athletes, and, in the end, we held our own,” he said. 

“We did well at a particular game on Saturday morning. A lot of us had to play four quarters of it, which was really challenging, but we ended up having a really close game (21-16, I think) against an actual water polo club, CT Premier,” Gao said.

Wise also commented on the game against CT Premier. “We lost our game against CT Premier from Connecticut. Even though it didn’t go our way, I think it was a big learning experience because we really came together and played as a team after losing badly the day before,” he said.

Lower Ethan Lu wanted to shout out a particular player on the team. “I want to shout out James Faulhaber for scoring a bunch of goals, a major threat—he kind of had a LeBron vs. the Warriors type of performance. Without him, we probably would’ve gone zero and twelve,” he said.

Among their various wins and a few losses, the team agreed that this tournament would only keep pushing their play to the next level. “We really grew as a team over the course of the couple games we played,” Lee said.

“We’re not used to having too much competition in our league,” Wise concluded. “But going forward, we will change our mindset now that we’re going against these really good teams so that we’ll always be giving it our all. I think the team played really well this weekend and we’re excited to continue playing with each other.”