ECAC Tournament Comes to Blodgett

Riding high off a narrow 9-8 win over George Washington in the final game of the otherwise bleak Princeton Invitational, Harvard men’s water polo anticipates boosting its 2-4 record and proving it can adjust to a new coach and new set of players this weekend, when it hosts the 2010 Eastern College Athletic Conference men’s water polo championship at Blodgett Pool.

“We’re still in the feeling-out phase of our schedule,” coach Ted Minnis said. “We’re going to keep doing what we do. The guys need to get comfortable getting used to…the lessons we are learning.”

Despite the 1-3 record at last weekend’s tournament, both Minnis and his players claim the losses signaled areas for improvement this past week in practice.

“With our smaller roster, our first six games have been learning to adjust to a smaller 10-person rotation,” co-captain Brent Voith said. “Now that we have that under our belt, we need to maximize our energy and minutes in the pool.”

The Crimson, seeded 10th, will face off against seventh-seed MIT (1-1) today at 4:30 p.m. in the first of at least three matches for the weekend.

“We watched them play a couple weeks ago,” Minnis said. “MIT is very good. They have great speed in transition. We want to minimize turnovers and shut down their counterattacks.”

According to senior Alex Thompson, Harvard especially wants to beat MIT today because the Engineers have cast the Crimson out of the first round of playoffs for the past two years.

“Last year, we were pretty disappointed in ourselves when we were eliminated in the playoffs by them,” Thompson said. “You try to forget the game, but you also need to keep it as a motivator.”

Harvard will have to look out for MIT standouts Craig Cheney and Columbus Leonard, who were honored by the Collegiate Water Polo Association last week as Northern Division Rookie of the Week and Divisional Defensive Player of the Week, respectively.

If the Crimson loses to the Engineers, it will play the loser of the game between sixth-seeded Fordham (4-5) and eleventh-seeded Mercyhurst (2-2), who have also both defeated George Washington at the Navy Invitational earlier this season.

But if they win this afternoon, the men will take on second seed Princeton (3-1) tomorrow for the second time this week.

Harvard lost 14-9 to the Tigers on Sept. 11, despite holding a 6-5 lead at half-time.

Sophomore Tim Wenzlau led Princeton in last weekend’s win over the Crimson with five goals and will likely be a major threat to Harvard again this weekend should the teams rematch.

Princeton returns to the ECAC Championship as last year’s runner-up, behind Navy, which is not entered in the 2010 tournament.

No matter the opponent, Minnis and Voith agree that the team will not base its strategies on a specific opposing offense or defense.

“We haven’t paid a lot of attention to the other teams yet,” Minnis said. “We will let the other teams adjust to us.”

According to Voith, the Crimson will instead continue to improve upon its work from earlier in the season.

“We’re not changing anything for this tournament, but we’ll [continue to] run our new offense; we’re running our drives and picks in a different scheme,” Voith said. “And this [past] week in practice, we tightened up the intricacies of it. With any sort of system it takes time and effort and practice for everyone to be at the same pace.”

The Harvard-hosted tournament will run through Sunday and feature twelve teams, led by first-seed Bucknell (6-2).

The Crimson’s best showing in the ECAC championship was fourth place in 2002. But Voith hopes the home-pool advantage will factor favorably into his squad’s finish this year.

“When the home-game crowd comes out, they usually bring a good atmosphere,” Voith said.

As for Minnis, he wants to beat more than just Harvard’s opponents—he wants to beat expectations.

“Whenever you come into a tournament that is a seeded tournament, you want to do better than they seeded you,” Minnis said. “We came in seeded tenth, and we want to break the top nine. The season is a staircase, and we want to keep climbing it and going up.”