Schedule rife with talented California squads

“We want to win it all this year,” senior utility Alex Edmunds said. “It’s about having fun and being a team.”

Winning the NCAA Championship would be a very tall task for preseason No. 20 Princeton. For one thing, no school outside of California has ever reached the title game. The Tigers also face heavy competition inside their conference and division, as water polo powerhouses No. 10 Navy, perennial rival Bucknell and No. 18 George Washington are all CWPA opponents.

“Our chances [to win] are looking good, but the first game will be a real test,” Edmunds said.

This weekend the team opens the season by hosting the Princeton Invitational, a tournament featuring top-class teams from across the country. The games will be a benchmark for the Tigers, as they will face several teams from the water polo hotbed of California. At 7:30 Friday night, Princeton will kick off its season against No. 14 UC San Diego. Saturday, the Tigers will play No. 15 Santa Clara at 12:45 and No. 3 Stanford at 8:30 p.m. Finally, on Sunday, Princeton will face off against conference rival No. 19 Brown.

“We’re excited about the challenge,” head coach Luis Nicolao said. “It’s a great way for us to get some early-season competition at a high level.”

Then comes the weekend of Sept. 20 for the ECAC Championship, where they will play No. 12 St. Francis, No. 9 Brown, Bucknell and a yet-to-be-determined opponent. This is another important test for Princeton, as it will show whether the team is ready to compete within the CWPA.

“St. Francis is a very good team,” Edmunds said. “They have a lot of legitimate players.”

Last year’s squad was a stronger team than its record showed due to its tendency to commit errors at inopportune moments. As a result, the team has worked this summer on limiting mistakes and improving team play.

The team also struggled due to its reliance on star Zach Beckman ’08. Beckman was the team’s leading scorer by more than 30 goals.

“We definitely have a much deeper team,” Edmunds said. “We have a lot of talent, and we need to make our potential into results. There’s no way of knowing [how we’ll finish], but I’m very optimistic about our ability this weekend.”

The key players for the Tigers this season are Edmunds, junior utility Mark Zalewski, who is the Tigers’ top returning scorer, and senior utility Brendan Colgan, who struggled with injuries through much of the 2007 campaign but still scored 17 goals.

After the ECAC Championship, Princeton has a weekend of conference games in the Washington, D.C. area. Saturday, Sept. 27, the Tigers face both Johns Hopkins and Navy, followed by a game against George Washington the next day. Though two of the three teams are unranked, all will be tough opponents for the Tigers.

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“We don’t want to focus on what [the top-10] teams do; we want to focus on what we do,” Nicolao said when asked about the team’s grueling schedule.

After a week off, Princeton heads out west the weekend of Oct. 11 on a road trip to play No. 2 USC and participate in the SoCal Tournament. While the schedule for the tournament has not been released, it will be yet another tough series for the Tigers, as California teams are in general very good. To compete against these difficult opponents, the Princeton offense will have to perform very well.

“We’re really working on playing hard and trying to run a half-court offense very well,” Edmunds said.

The Tigers return home for a stretch of eight conference matchups that will help determine their position in the Southern Division Championships and finish the homestand with the last regular-season game of the year against conference foe Queens.

“We’re right there in the mix [in the Eastern Division],” Nicolao said. “Any thing short of [winning Easterns] would be frustrating,”

This weekend, the team will begin its attempt to live up to that high bar.