On Oct. 31, Delta men’s water polo team ended its week-long losing streak to beat Ohlone 11-6 at home.
Ohlone had had early possession of the ball at the start of the game but possession changed rapidly as both teams worked tirelessly on the offensive and defensive.
Freshman Simon Aker scored the first goal of the game in the first quarter. The Mustangs would hold off Ohlone the entire first quarter, ending that quarter 1-0.
In the second quarter Delta maintained its lead adding two more points on the board before Ohlone would score its first goal of the game.
Defense was the emphasis of Coach Micheal Maroney’s comments during the game. The team brought the second-quarter score to 6-3 in favor of the Mustangs.
Quarter three posed as a greater challenge to the team as Ohlone put 3 more points on the board only to be evenly matched with Delta’s offensive.The Mustangs’ never let the lead falter beyond repair, ending the third quarter 10-6
Maddox Todd scored the final game in the second half of quarter four ending the game 11-6
Todd scored two of the 11 goals, and reflected on them fondly noting them as improvements to a rocky couple of games.
“I started the season off good, was scoring a lot, recently kind of haven’t been able to quite score the ball. So, that’s special, you know, just get going again,” he said.
Todd is one of the many freshmen the team has welcomed this year, having only four sophomore players on the team. Only three of the four sophomores were in the water for the game.
Of the sophomores that played wasTobias Beutel who noted communication as the largest issue the team faced towards the beginning of the season.
“It was a big issue and now we’ve done a lot better,” said Beutel.
Beutel credited team bonding for the improvements in communication.
“A lot of team bonding then working around just across games, just really getting to know, like every person on the team,” he said.
Maroney commented that there’s always room for them to improve, “.. especially with young freshmen that are true freshmen playing you know straight out of high school… they improve on one aspect of the game and then the next aspect they still don’t have the skill for that particular individual skill. So they’ll need to keep adapting so every time you make an adjustment like they have been doing and with all the good stuff they did today. They need to also step up and what’s the next correction I need to make. That’s the big thing is, what else can I do?”
The team has its next tournament on Nov. 14 at Merced College.
