With two minutes left in regulation, San Marcos girls water polo held a slim 9-8 lead over Newport Harbor in Thursday’s CIF-SS Open Division opener at Elings Aquatic Center.
After a few failed possessions, the Sailors moved their way down the pool and Madison Mack converted a goal at the buzzer of the shot clock with 1:12 left.
Neither team was able to score before the end of regulation to send the game into overtime.
There, Newport Harbor’s Ryan Chalupnik found the back of the net just 18 seconds into the first of two three-minute overtimes.
While that may have been a sign of a high-scoring overtime battle, the exact opposite unfolded as neither side scored for the remainder of overtime.
The San Marcos offense was consistently turned away and two offensive foul calls in the final three possessions for the Royals put the final nail in the coffin.
When the final buzzer sounded, Newport Harbor pulled out the 10-9 win over San Marcos to advance to the semifinals against Orange Lutheran.
“I’m super proud of my team,” Royals coach Chuckie Roth said. “I thought we played pretty well, we played through a lot of adversity tonight. There were a lot of strange calls both ways.”
The Sailors came out and punched first, scoring the first goal of the game less than a minute into the opening quarter.
However, the rest of the first was dominated by San Marcos. Bethany King got the Royals on the board at the 3:42 mark by converting a long shot off a pass from Charlotte Raisin.
One minute later, Raisin fed Naomi Enright on the outside, who fired the ball across the goal and into the back corner of the net for the 2-1 lead.
King and Enright each scored again before the end of the quarter to expand the San Marcos lead out to 4-1 heading into the second.
Raisin tallied her third assist of the quarter to King while King found Enright for her second goal.
The second quarter was more of a defensive battle, as each side managed to find the back of the cage just once in those seven minutes of play.
Following a Newport Harbor goal, King netted her third score of the night off yet another assist from Raisin to give the Royals a 5-2 lead at halftime.
“I thought we were in good control of the game, we were controlling what we could do,” Roth said.
However, the foul calls began to roll in throughout the third quarter. The Royals were forced to play multiple possessions shorthanded after exclusions, which allowed the Newport Harbor offense to more than double their goal total in the third quarter alone.
Meanwhile, the San Marcos offense netted a pair of goals thanks to Marina Brown, who followed up a missed shot off the crossbar for the score, and Lucy Haaland-Ford, who lofted the ball over the goalkeeper for the goal.
When all was said and done in the third quarter, the Royals held onto a slim 7-6 lead. However, San Marcos would be forced to play without Charlotte Raisin for the final quarter and overtime due to fouls.
“I thought we did a great job playing with a lot of ejections for almost the entire game,” Roth said. “It was hard when Charlotte went out, but we rallied really well.
“They knew when they had a couple of our starters in foul trouble they could just get after it.”
In the fourth, Makenna Stretz got the scoring started for San Marcos with an impressive lob shot over the defense from the outside that snuck into the goal to bring the lead out to 8-6.
After Newport Harbor answered with a score, Enright turned around and scored in almost identical fashion to Stretz, making it 9-7 in favor of the Royals.
From there, the Sailors rattled off two unanswered goals in the final two minutes of regulation and carried that momentum on both sides of the pool into the dramatic overtime win.
“They got momentum and played both their centers at the same time,” Roth said. “They knew they were short-handed and they capitalized on that… It’s not the way I wanted to see that game go.”
