Sports, Women's Sports, Women's Water Polo

LBSU Women’s polo conditions for Big West conference

The Long Beach State women’s water polo team has a difficult schedule ahead, but their top priority won’t be getting wins.

This season, head coach Gavin Arroyo said LBSU’s focus will be reaching its peak performance as a team.

“It’s early in the season, our focus early on has been conditioning and starting to put some pieces together,” Arroyo said. “We’re trying to get safe on defense and just kind of work our way up from there.”

The team continues to work on endurance training through the start of the year to prepare for what could be a trying season.

“Our conference is really strong this year,” Arroyo said. “Since I’ve been doing this in the Big West it’s probably collectively our strongest conference.”

They have already seen their fair share of tough competition this year coming out of the UC Santa Barbara invitational with a record of 0-4. All loses came from non-conference teams, but these defeats don’t seem to shake their confidence.

“[We won’t] let the other teams affect us and how we play,” freshman attacker Tori Morrissey said. “We want to play for ourselves, play our game and our cage.”

Morrissey is not referring to the cage goalie Alexis Butler has to protect either.

“We’re building our team cage. Whatever happens in the game, it’s not going to mess with our cage,” senior Jessica Brooks said. “We might be up, and we’re still going to play the same as we would be when we’re down; we’re going to have the same fire.”

The starting players are a mixture of upper- and lower-classmen. Arroyo requires leadership from his seniors while training the leaders of future teams.

“Our team morale is good,” senior center Emily Matheson said. “We have good leadership and the younger players are falling into line and our system really well. We have a good rapport with the younger kids, we’re all learning as we go. Even though we’re seniors we’re definitely not perfect and the freshmen do show us up all the time, but I think we have a really good relationship with each other as a whole.”

Morrissey is one of the team’s top scorers despite this being her first year.

“She had pretty good weekend first out,” Arroyo said. “I think she’s just going to get better and better as she gets in better shape.”

This aligns with what Arroyo hopes to accomplish this year. But reaching that potential requires daily training.

“At the moment I’m just working on what I can do to improve for the team,” Morrissey said. “Knowing how to use [my skillset] to the best of my ability in the game, into our set plays. Really knowing our plays inside and out, and being ready with my skills to give as much as I can to the team.”

The 49ers will try to get their first win on Feb. 7 at home against the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps. It will be their last home game until they host Bucknell on March 17.

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