Polo Teams Dominate Rivalry Games

Recently, the girls and boys’ water polo teams beat 1 of our biggest rivals, Acalanes. The varsity boys team won 13-8 and the girls won 7-4, with both games taking place at the Acalanes.

Junior Kaia Levenfeld was especially enthusiastic: “Our team was very excited to play the game and were confident, even though Acalanes is a very good team and we knew it was going to be a very competitive game… we were very excited and confident going in feeling that we would have success for the game.”

The girls’ varsity team felt ready to play; they knew they were prepared and were also in the right mindset. Levenfeld said, “My mindset was very focused but also very excited because I knew what we needed to do, we had our plan and our strategy that was necessary, but it was also very exciting because playing Acalanes is fun. We love the rivalry and the fun competitiveness that we have with them.”

The boys’ varsity water polo team also seemed to be very competitive with their rival team. Senior Brody Crouch said, “There is always pressure, you never want to lose. I am also very competitive and I know our team is very competitive, but going on to their turf they had a much bigger cheering section than we did so we were definitely worried about that but we knew if we kept level headed and kept confidence and energy up we would beat them so we were happy and excited.”

1 of the other things that made the girls’ water polo win so exciting was the fact that they won in overtime. This was stressful for the team since the last few times they had gone into overtime they had ended up losing the game.

Senior and captain Maggie Hawkins said, “I think the game was a toss-up, I mean we had beat them by a lot in the first game against them but then we lost to them the second time so we were not sure how it was going to play out, and then we went into overtime and we were all thinking about how it was going to play out.”

After the big wins, both teams decided to do some team bonding and warming down to try to calm their excitement.

Levenfeld said,”[Once we won the game,] I swam and got out of the pool and hugged all of my teammates and we were all congratulating each other and we were very excited. After we shook hands with them we warmed down and we spent some time congratulating each other because it was a really good game for our team.”

Crouch added, “We were all very happy, we did our normal great games to ourselves and complemented each other, we were happy with the end result.”