For those not familiar with water polo, they’d be surprised to discover how much activity — some of it even legal! — goes on beneath the surface of the water during a match.
On Tuesday at Turlock High’s Steve Feaver Aquatic Center, that activity bubbled to the surface in the Bulldogs’ intense and physical 19-10 Central California Athletic League win over rival Pitman.
In the lid-lifter of the CCAL twinbill, Turlock’s girls defeated the Pride 12-7.
The doubleheader was all part of the 10th annual Kayla Bernardi Bee Positive Pink-Out Games, in which the teams wear pink headgear in honor of Kayla Bernardi, who lost her battle with leukemia in 2015.
“It gets a bit handsy, especially in the rivalry match,” said junior hole-set Lars Wenstrand, who scored three goals for the Bulldogs. “It definitely gets more intense, especially at my position. You will receive punches.”
Cooper Harris led all scorers in the contest with seven goals, including three in a span of 2 minutes, 40 seconds over the third and fourth quarters that helped increase the Bulldogs’ cozy 13-8 cushion to a commanding 16-8 margin.
Wenstrand completed his hat trick to make it 17-9 with 2:12 left in the contest. Jacob Packwood also scored three goals for Turlock, while Cristian Perez tallied three goals for the Pride.
“Turlock-Pitman is always going to be an emotional game,” said THS coach Nic Serratos, whose team impress to 8-1 overall and 1-0 in the CCAL. “We preach defense here; it just kind of took us a while to settle in and figure out what offense they were running. They made some great adjustments and we weren’t ready for some of the stuff they were doing. … Making some good adjustments at halftime really helped us.”
The game was knotted 3-3 after one quarter and Turlock held a slim 8-5 lead at the intermission, but picked up the defensive intensity in the second half.
“Definitely, definitely, definitely,” replied Harris, when asked if the Bulldogs pride themselves on defense. “I feel like defense is the biggest part of the game, Your offense runs off your defense, especially your counter-attack, too.”
Despite the loss, Pitman coach Justin Souza found a lot of positives in his team’s performance.
“I thought we did a lot of good things,” said Souza, whose team falls to 5-2 and 0-1. “We drew a lot of ejections, and if we could’ve put them away, it might’ve been a little closer. And it was really great seeing our sets going to work, like Cristian Perez and Braden Silveira. It was really cool to see them play well.”
Much like the boys game, the girls started out close, with the teams tied 2-2 after one quarter and 5-5 at halftime.
But defense carried the Bulldogs in the second half, with goalie Reese Thomas delivering three key saves in the first 100 seconds of the fourth quarter that allowed THS to maintain the four-goal lead it had built up in the third. Three of those four goals came from Coralie Newel.
“I kind of fell apart in the first half,” said Thomas, a senior. “And in the second half I gained it back, and didn’t let them steal the momentum.”
Newell finished the game with five goals, as did teammate Livia Romero.
Pitman goalie Jayda Salazar kept her squad close, totaling 14 saves. She even scored a goal late in the contest that closed the gap to 9-6 with just over two minutes to play.
Kaydence Bailey led the Pride (7-1, 0-1) offensively with three goals.
“Defensively, we went out and found who the shooters were in the pool and attacked that,” said Bulldogs’ coach Caitlin Cornell, whose team is now 2-5, 1-0. “It was just finding out who the strong players were in the pool and who we could kind of slough off on.”
Both teams will be on the road Thursday for CCAL contests. Turlock will play at Gregori, while Pitman will visit Modesto.
