Second-seeded w. water polo enters ECACs

Coming off a successful run last weekend, the women's water polo team will look ahead to the ECAC Championships this weekend. The Tigers (17-6) are seeded second of eight teams overall in the tournament, behind only Hartwick (25-9), a team that ousted the Tigers, 9-7, at the Bucknell Invitational at the end of February.

The Tigers will play their first game against Iona, in Providence, R.I. at 12:30 p.m. on Saturday. The Tigers and the seventh-seeded Gaels (9-8) have not yet gone head-to-head this season. That puts them behind George Washington, seeded fifth, and Bucknell, seeded sixth, teams that the Tigers have defeated decisively this season, both more than once.

However, the Tigers do have crippling injuries they will have to overcome. Freshman Megan Zitren is out for the remainder of the season due to knee surgery, and sophomore utility Courtney Mee cannot play, after fracturing her arm blocking a shot in practice this week. As both players are strong offensively and defensively, the team will need to do some patchwork to fill the empty slots and compensate for the loss of those teammates.

"We need to make sure we slow down our offense and work on our man-up opportunities," freshman utility Elyse Colgan said. "We have been working a lot on the 6-on-5 offense in practice, and it will hopefully come together this weekend as well."

The outcome of the Tigers-Gaels match-up early Saturday afternoon will determine whom the Tigers meet in their next game, as well as what time that match will commence. The tournament is scheduled to take place over Saturday and Sunday and will help the Tigers prepare for continued championship play over the next few weeks.

"Even though [the Iona game] should be a good warm-up game, we still need to go out hard and focus on our offense and the other specifics we need to work on," Colgan added. "We will hopefully get to play Brown and Hartwick for our other two games, both of which will be very good games. We haven't played Brown yet this season, but they are a solid team."

"This is going to be a huge weekend for us," junior center Kathryn Parolin said. "If all goes well, we should face Brown on Saturday night, who we have not met yet this year, but who has always been a strong competitor in the past. We are ranked ahead of them in the national rankings and should be able to beat them, which would bring us to the championship game. If we did face Hartwick, I think it would be a great game. We have improved a ton as the season has progressed."

"We think we will probably face Brown Saturday and Hartwick in the championship," junior goalie Maddy McCarthy said. "But anything can happen in these tournaments at the end of the season. Hartwick is a very good team and they like to use a lot of unconventional creative offenses, which posed some problems for our defense earlier in the season. But I think we are a much stronger team defensively now, and we are looking forward to facing them again this weekend."

The other teams competing in the tournament are Harvard and Wagner. Hartwick holds the first seed, followed by Princeton in second, Brown in third, Harvard in fourth, George Washington in fifth, Bucknell in sixth, Iona in seventh and Wagner in eighth.

"This weekend is just exciting because it gives us the opportunity to see how we've progressed since the beginning of the season," Colgan said. "It is also the first chance for us to really compete since we got back from our training trip to California. If we played like we did in some of the California games we should definitely dominate the tournament this weekend."

"This weekend we are not only looking to defend the ECAC championship title which we won last year," McCarthy added, "but also to make this weekend the first championship win of three that we would like to win, the other two being Southerns and Easterns."

Colgan added, "The next major tournament we have are Eastern Championships, where we'll come up against Michigan and Indiana, so this is a good opportunity for us to prepare for that and get excited for the rest of the season."