Photo Essay: Boys water polo plays for Division 1 CCS title

On Monday, November 12, the varsity boys water polo team played in CCS finals for the first time since 2012. With a closely-matched game, Palo Alto edged out Los Altos with a final score of 12-13, and the team placed second in Division 1 CCS. With this photo essay, the Talon aims to captures the determination of the team and highlights of the CCS championship game.

“It was a hard-fought game. Palo Alto came out strong, it was a tied game basically all the way through. They pulled away in the fourth quarter. We had a comeback attempt—it didn’t work out, but we’re going to keep it going, keep training hard through the year, and we’re going to be back next year.” —junior Boris Palant

“I think our team has really good team chemistry. We all fill different areas, so some of us are more defense based, some of us score the goals, some of us play set, but we all work together, piece together those individual pieces of the puzzle and come together to make a really good team.” — junior Adam Hollingworth

“In this game, the big one strategy we had was driving across on offense. Palo Alto, on defense, would drop two people from the outer ring, so we practiced driving one of the people on the outer ring across to make sure we had an opening to get a nice shot.” — senior Greg Roper

“We had a lot of focus on patience and trying to make sure the ball wasn’t rushed to the goal really quickly. At the beginning of the year, we would just try to shoot the ball really quickly instead of trying to pass for a more open and better shot. Towards the end of the year, it looked a lot smoother. People were communicating and passing and we got the ball to the goal a lot more. It really turned out to be a whole new step up for us.” —junior Liam Bodkin

“It was a great season for us. We came a long way from the beginning of the season when we expected it was going to be a rebuilding year because we lost several seniors last year. We improved every single game, we went up to Sacramento, we saw how they played, we brought that back here and we won a lot of games. But in the end, we came up short, and Paly played a great game.” — junior Boris Palant