The California Lutheran University Regals Water Polo team fell to the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Athenas on Saturday, April 21 at the Samuelson Aquatic Center.  Seniors Sam Wulfestieg, Kristi McGee and Erin Cunefare were celebrated before game time and though the Regals fought back hard, they were defeated on their Senior Day, 11-10.

Despite losing by one point to the Athenas, the Regals held a strong offensive presence against Claremont-Mudd-Scripps. McGee tallied a hat trick against the Athenas in the first quarter.

Regals Head Coach Craig Rond said was pleased by McGee and the rest of the offense for Cal Lutheran and said he knows what his team needs to focus on for the coming week to prepare for the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference tournament.

“We’ve been looking forward to that for a lot of games,” said Rond on McGee’s hat trick.  “The offense was okay—they ran a really strong press on us at the beginning, but we did a good job going against that.  This game was relatively meaningless—we’re going to play them next week in the semifinals of SCIAC so, I mean every game means something but next week we’re going to have to be better, and maybe this will help us get a little more focused.”

Another key asset to the Regals offense is junior attacker, Nicole Guerriero, who added a goal and an assist for the Regals offense.

“On offense we understood that they had a weaker goalie and that we just needed to place our shots correctly.  We know that we need to find our openings and divide our five-player cross-up to get our center open,” Guerriero said. 

Though the Regals struggled with their defense against Claremont-Mudd-Scipps, junior goalkeeper Bailey Meyer held her own against the Athenas, saving eight shots on goal. 

“It wasn’t probably our best performance, but still every time there was a goal we went right back up to the line and got back at it,” Meyer said. 

Although the Regals lost against Claremont-Mudd-Scripps, the game doesn’t count against them in terms of heading into the SCIAC tournament, which will begin April 27. 

“In a sense we’re still going to play them again at home—we’re still the number two seed in SCIAC and we’re hoping that this game will just build our confidence and teach us what we need to do—build our confidence, make us more aggressive to help us be the championship caliber team that we want to be,” Meyer said.

The Regals are currently ranked as the second seed in the SCIAC tournament and plan on working out some of their defensive kinks in the week leading up to the tournament. 

“We didn’t play defense today.  We didn’t play the defense that we’ve been playing all year.  We’ve really prided ourselves on making it really hard for teams to score and today it just wasn’t in sync—It was really out of sorts and they got a lot of goals,” Rond said. 

Though they lost to the Athenas on Senior Day, the Regals plan to come back better than ever Friday, April 27, at home for a rematch.

“For defense we’re going to focus on being quicker to move to the ball and having better shot blocking,” Guerriero said. 

The Regals also plan on working on some more offensive techniques to help improve their communication while in the pool. 

“This next week we’re going to be working on our defense, our shooting and also just our aggressiveness on offense to prepare for SCIAC,” Meyer said.

Although the day ended on a sour note, the Cal Lutheran Regals are looking forward to gearing up to compete in the SCIAC tournament. 

“We feel like we know what we need to work on to beat them next Friday,” Guerriero said.  “We know exactly where we deviated from in our game plan and how we can fix our defensive mistakes, but offensively we’re pretty proud of getting to 10 goals today.”

Alexa Barnes
Reporter