Polomen Fail To Win "Big Games"

It's become standard sportscaster fare to say that the difference between good and great teams is an ability to win "the big games," those against tough teams at critical points in a season.

The men's water polo team (12-7 overall, 1-3 Ivy) found out the hard truth of that Dierdorfian cliche' this fall as it lost myriads of "should have been" contests against some of the nation's best.

"Assessing this year is sort of hard," senior Captain Jeff Zimmerman says. "We were a good team to start out with, and we beat a lot of teams that we should have. But we didn't beat most of the teams that we needed to to get where we wanted to go."

The team began the season set on nothing less than an Ivy League championship and a trip to the Eastern Championships at the University of Arkansas on Nov. 6-7. The squad had qualified for the tournament last season and two seasons before, and was fairly confident it would make the trip this year.

"We were excited," Zimmerman says. "We knew that we had a lot of good young players, and we thought we could do at least as welll as last year."

But while that youth sustained them through less demanding contests, it killed then in close games where experience is the prize commodity, a fact which kept the team from having a championship season.

"We really had six strong, experienced starters," Zimmerman says. "After that we didn't have much depth, and that hurt us against the tougher, deeper teams."

Brown was the team's chief nemesis. After the Crimson beat the Bears last season for the first time in 15 years, Brown retaliated with three wins this season to wrest away the league title. Each game was close--the scores were 15-7, 15-9 and 11-9, respectively--but each was nonetheless a loss.

"We've had a pretty strong rivalry with Brown over the years, or at least we'd like to think so," says Zimmerman. "Anytime we lose to them, it's painful. You can imagine what three losses will do. We could've won them all, but we were just unprepared."

The pain associated with the Brown losses, however, was nothing compared to the associated with an end-of-the-season loss to Army at the North Division Championships on October 30. The top four teams at the tournament go on to Easterns and, having beaten most of the teams in the course of the regular season, even the hard-luck Crimson seemed likely to make the cut.

Army ended all such hopes in the first-round of the tournament, however. Showing up to the contest fired-up and shaved--a rarity at a water polo event--the Cadets snuck past the sleeping Crimson, 10-8.

Even after two convincing wins over MIT and Queens in the final two rounds, Harvard was forced to settle for fifth.

"That was sad," Zimmerman says. "We had beaten them earlier in the season [18-15 in overtime] and were pretty sure that we would beat them again. They just showed up and ran way with it--it exemplified all our close games all year."

But players will remember the season as a good one.

"I think there's a tendency to think bad of the whole season because of some of the tough games that we had, the fact that we didn't take it to the next level," Zimmerman says. "That would be too bad-- we did well and we really came together. It was a good experience."

MEN'S WATER POLO

Record: 12-7

Ivy League: 1-3

Key Players: Jeff Zimmerman (98 goals, 36 assists); Jose Busquets (69 goals, 17 assists); Julian Alexander (45 goals, 20 assists).

Seniors: Jeff Zimmerman, Phil Grant, Erik Atkisson.