Water polo team looks to recover from rough weekend against easier opposition

After an up and down Spring Break, the Hoosiers will keep busy before Divisional Championships.

The No. 15 IU water polo team will head to South Euclid, Ohio this weekend for a three-game stand. On Saturday, the Hoosiers have contests against Salem International and Notre Dame (Ohio) College.

Indiana will conclude the weekend with a match against Gannon University. The Hoosiers will be heavily favored as its three opponents have a combined eight wins. Still, IU will keep its foot on the gas in preparing for their games.

“We haven’t been doing anything that special in preparation for this weekend,” IU Coach Barry King said. “We have focused a lot on individual skills to sharpen our shooting and passing. This period of time is a lot more about us than it is about the teams that we are playing.”

After nine consecutive wins, Indiana sputtered last weekend at the Aztec Invitational, falling in three of four matches. At 20-7, the poor results were uncharacteristic of the current IU squad. King noted a lack of distribution among other things as faults made by Indiana.
 
“We played poorly for 24 hours and it cost us three matches,” King said, “In the pool, out biggest issue is offensive balance in terms of who is responsible for taking shots and scoring goals.”

On top of that, a main concern at the start of the season was a lack of both leadership and age, considering goalkeeper Cassie Wyckoff is the only senior who has played this season. Although the team is far from struggling, the team’s youth has posed struggle, King said.

“The biggest issue that we have when we struggle is we have a very young team that is not used to playing the density of tough contests that we do,” King said. “I thought that we might have a stretch when we didn’t play that well just because it is very difficult to ask this inexperienced team to be top level all of the time.”

That being said, the combination of the underclassmen’s play and the net minding of Wyckoff have been the source of the team’s success. Sophomore Shae Fournier has led the squad all season and has been torching opponents with a 2.63 goal per game average. She is currently tied for fifth on Indiana’s single-season scoring list and needs ten goals to set the record.

Freshman Colleen McNaught has also found her own with four hat tricks in the past eight matches. She additionally leads the team in assists with 38.

King said distributing the ball will give IU the continued success it seeks.

“We struggle when the bulk of that load is heaped on one or two players. We are very good when attempts are spread around,” King said.