The men’s water polo season may not have gone as successfully as some would have thought it would back in October, but it did end with a sweet victory for the four graduating seniors.
In Sunday’s Collegiate Water Polo Association seventh-place game against MIT, the four seniors – Nate Little, Paul Deasey, Daniel Tyner and Adam Streeter – combined for nine goals to lead GW to a 12-9 season-concluding victory.
It was a win that came after a long weekend of Championship play that the Colonials may have never even been a part of if the CWPA hadn’t expanded the tournament from 12 teams from eight this year.
After a sixth-place finish at the Southern Division championships last week, GW snuck into the Championships with a ninth-seed at-large bid.
In the Colonials tournament opener on Friday, they found a familiar opponent waiting for them in the pool: eight-seeded Johns Hopkins. In the fourth meeting of the year between the division rivals, GW held the Blue Jays to their fewest goals, three, since Sept. 2009
Sophomore goalkeeper Connor Dillon, who had 10 saves in the match, held off the Blue Jays on their final two possessions to secure the first-match victory.
“It was a great win, great defensive effort,” head coach Scott Reed said in a press release. “We wanted to focus on controlling the offense and being consistent for four quarters, and that’s what we did. That was the key.”
On the back end of Friday’s doubleheader, GW was forced to take on the tournament’s top ranked team and defending champion: No. 13 Saint Francis.
Scoring seven goals in the first quarter alone, the Terriers kept their foot on the pedal, never allowing the Colonials offense to make a dent in the margin. GW would fall 14-6, with four of the goals coming by way of junior Ridhvan Pehlivan.
Saturday’s matchup with No.19 Brown had a similar theme, as the Bears went on an eight-goal run over the second and third quarters to take an insurmountable lead and run away with the win, 16-6.
In addition to the team’s win in the seventh-place game Sunday, the Colonials found another bright spot by way of sophomore Bogdan Petvokic. The center defender followed up his 2012 Southern Division Rookie of the Year award with a nod to the CWPA’s All-Southern Division First team this year.
The award makes him just the second Colonial since patrick Dodge in 2002 to earn multiple first-team accolades.
As a team, the Colonials finished with a 16-15 overall record, it’s first winning season since 2006. It was a season that saw GW peak as the No. 19 ranked team earlier this year. But despite its fall from grace, the season flashed signs of promising things to come in the future.
