Boys’ water polo

Boy’s water polo finished last season’s CCS championship in second place, moving into the PAL Bay Division as a result. With essentially the same varsity roster to accompany the new varsity coach, Brett Reynolds, the team is hopeful they can rise to meet the stiffer competition and continue improving as the season progresses.

While the athletes continue to build swimming fundamentals like endurance and speed, the coaches hope to teach them some aspects of college-level play and broader fundamentals — humility, perseverance, and teamwork.

The varsity roster has remained mostly intact from last season and contains a host of strong newcomers, including freshman standouts William Wuebbling, Dylan Enriquez, and David Kossar. However, Reynolds emphasizes that all players have an important role in building a strong team.

“It’s not always about the best players — sometimes it can be the guys that bring the team together, that work hard; those can be just as key components to a successful team as a star player,” Reynolds said. “The way that you win at this sport at a higher level is [by] focusing on the team and less about an individual.”

Reynolds has spent practices encouraging the team to embrace other aspects of the game that contribute to winning aside from scoring goals.

“Kids, when they play age group, they just learn that if you score, that’s good. And water polo is a lot more than that,” Reynolds said. “It’s about speed, it’s about shot blocking, it’s about defense, it’s about assists. It’s a team sport, and so if somebody is scoring, it’s because another player is setting them up and doing the hard work behind it.”

As the team works toward accomplishing their lofty goals, they will have to focus on the small details as well.

“That’s a key teaching point that we want to emphasize this year,” Reynolds said. “It’s not just scoring — it’s all the little things that make a good team.”