San Marcos girls water polo turned in an all-around effort en route to a 19-9 victory over crosstown rival Santa Barbara High on Tuesday at the San Marcos pool deck.
The Royals (10-1, 5-0 Channel League) had seven different players find the back of the net in the win over a shorthanded and youthful Dons (12-2, 0-2 CL) team.
“A day like today is a great opportunity to develop a couple of kids and give them an opportunity that maybe they hadn’t had,” San Marcos head coach Chuckie Roth said. “It’s also an opportunity for the upperclassmen to be leaders, and I thought Bethany King and Charlotte Raisin did a good job at that.
“Charlotte did a really good job about that during this game, and then Bethany always is one of those girls, and Sophie Yonker did a great job.”
Santa Barbara head coach Mark Walsh was proud of his team’s effort and attitude while facing the strong San Marcos squad.
“I was really proud of how we didn’t get down,” Walsh said. “We didn’t get on each other when things didn’t go right. If we made a mistake, no one was yelling at each other, so I really liked how they stayed supportive… I thought that was probably the greatest thing I saw.
“We also did a lot of individual things that don’t show up on the scoreboard, but those things will go with us going forward.”
Despite the final score, the Dons held the advantage for the majority of the opening quarter.
Santa Barbara kicked off the scoring when Rose Nelley connected with Violette Bailey, who found the back of the net for the 1-0 lead. One minute later, Jules Horton converted a penalty shot to double it to 2-0 at the 4:53 mark.
The Royals didn’t get on the board until the 3:07 mark in the quarter when Charlotte Raisin followed up a miss and fired in a goal. That sparked an offensive barrage from SM, which unleashed four more goals in the final minutes of the quarter to take a 5-2 lead into the second.
Raisin scored her second goal of the quarter, Bethany King netted a goal off an assist from Scarlet Akin, and Josie Drabik finished off the quarter with back-to-back scores.
That momentum carried over to the second quarter, where the Royals really pulled away by outscoring the Dons 7-1 to balloon the lead out to 12-3 by halftime.
San Marcos consistently turned strong defensive plays into offensive opportunities on the other end, with McKenna Stuart recording a hat trick in the quarter and Ella Grube scoring twice. Meanwhile, Raisin and Drabik each added a goal.
The lone SB score broke an 11-0 run for the Royals and came courtesy of a Kana Wolfe shot off a pass from Hope Smith.
“We’re fast and we’re dynamic, and when we play good defense, we can get up on the counter pretty quick, and so you saw a lot of that,” Roth said of his second-quarter outburst. “I probably put in my best talking group as well, so they’re working out situations. That was one of the lineups that works really well together.”
The third quarter mirrored the first in many ways, as the Dons came out firing with two straight goals by Wolfe to open the second-half scoring and cut the deficit down to 12-5.
However, SM responded with four unanswered goals in the final two minutes of the quarter to take a commanding 16-5 lead. The Royals who found the back of the net in the third were Drabik, Shea Estabrook, Lily Bordofsky and Jade Pattison.
San Marcos began the fourth with another scoring play as Sophie Yonker found Drabik, who turned around and scored her game-high fifth goal of the night while playing in her first rivalry game as a freshman.
“[Drabik] is a good kid. I really want to help her and her continued development of water polo,” Roth said. “I think that if we’re going to be good this year, we need a lot more out of JoJo, and so that’s why we’re really trying our best to help her, coach her and mentor her to be the player she’s going to be.”
The Dons continued to fight in the final quarter, outscoring the Royals 4-3 to bring the game to its final score of 19-9.
Bailey scored a pair of goals in the fourth after dealing with foul trouble for most of the game, while Horton and Rose Nelley rounded out the Santa Barbara scoring. Bailey and Wolfe led SB with three goals apiece.
[Bailey’s] outside shooting and posting up have been a big addition to what we didn’t have last year,” Walsh said. “Kana’s really improved a lot. She’s really positiv,e and she’s a former soccer player, a goalie, so she kind of sees the field and sees everything. She does have a good arm and did a good job of finding the openings.”
While SM earned the comfortable win on Tuesday, it has been operating without a natural goalie and has relied on several players rotating out of the position to anchor the defensive end.
“It is an opportunity, and people need to learn how to be resilient, and I really admire and appreciate the goalies that are going in there,” Roth said. “I know none of them truly want to be in there, but they want to be in there for the team.
“Today, my senior goalie, Anna Jacobsen, did a really good job. She’s a four-year member of the program, came in, played in a varsity-level game. She had no club water polo experience and I thought she did a really good job.”
While Drabik led the San Marcos offense, Raisin and Stuart closely followed with four goals apiece.