Men’s water polo head coach Dustin Litvak resigns before start of season

When Dustin Litvak arrived at Old Nassau in 2018, the men’s water polo program was content with competing for conference titles and NCAA appearances.

In eight years, Litvak turned the tide for men’s water polo, winning six conference titles and reaching the final four in 2023. He set the standard to not just win the conference, but aspire to win a national championship and compete with the best programs in the country.

But just a week before the season’s start, Litvak announced that he would be leaving the program to lead the women’s water polo program at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Calif.

“Leaving Princeton at all was just a really… challenging decision,” Litvak told The Daily Princetonian. “I just love those guys so much, love the program, love Princeton.”

The news came as a shock to the men’s water polo team, who found out about the change two weeks into the preseason and just eight days before the first scheduled game of the year.

“I think the main thing that was going through our heads was just like this disbelief,” junior utility Gavin Appeldorn told the ‘Prince,’ describing the team meeting when Litvak told the team he was leaving. “It was very overwhelming.”

“You could tell a lot of people’s breath in the room was taken away,” he continued.

Princeton quickly named women’s water polo head coach Derek Ellingson as the interim head coach for the 2026 season, following Litvak’s departure. A national search for a full-time replacement will commence at the end of the season.

Ellingson is currently the head coach of the women’s water polo team and has been part of the water polo programs at Princeton since 2004. His record as head coach is 148–46, and he has two conference titles and one NCAA final four appearance in 2023.

“[Leaving a week before the season started] was unfair to the guys, and still is unfair to the guys,” Litvak said. “Nobody deserves to go through this kind of change, you know, a week before your game starts.”

Litvak grew up in California and attended Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., coached high school water polo in California, and later worked as an assistant coach for both the men’s and women’s water polo programs at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) before taking the head coach position at Princeton in 2018. His wife is also from California.

“For most of my life, I put water polo above family,” Litvak said. “This is one of those times I just had to put family first… That was the driver behind the final decision to do this.”

“My dad is aging; he’s 86. My wife’s parents are out [in California] as well,” Litvak continued. “We have a three-year-old son, and it was becoming more and more challenging to raise him away from any family, without support.”

Despite the turmoil, the Orange and Black still have an optimistic outlook for the season, and aim to continue applying Litvak’s aspirational philosophy. The Tigers are currently 3–0 following the opening weekend of games at the Navy Invitational.

“We learned a lot from Dusty, and we’re going to keep the good things… Because Derek has a different coaching style, we’re going to learn different things,” senior captain and goalkeeper Kristóf Kovács said to the ‘Prince.’ “So we’ll just try to mix it together, keep the good things from both [coaches] and diversify the team.”

In the past five seasons under Litvak’s leadership, the program won five straight Northeast Water Polo Conference (NWPC) titles, an unprecedented run in Princeton conference play.

“In terms of his overall impact on the program… he had one of the largest culture shifts of all time,” Appeldorn said.

When Litvak arrived in 2018, Princeton found immediate NWPC success and claimed its first conference title in three years. Despite this, the Tigers struggled to compete with many of the California powerhouses.

“When I first got there, we were losing to UCLA, Stanford [University], and the [University of California, Berkeley] by 15-20 goals,” Litvak said. “It just wasn’t competitive, and the mindset was, let’s just beat Harvard, let’s beat Brown, let’s make the tournament, [win] our conference, and then nothing else really matters.”

In that same year, Litvak’s team lost to Stanford by 18 goals, showing the clear disparity between Princeton and the “Big Four.” In collegiate water polo, UCLA, Stanford, University of Southern California, and University of California, Berkeley have won every NCAA title since 1998.

In the very next season, Princeton finished an unimpressive 16–15 and fell to rival Harvard in the NWPC championship, signaling to Litvak that a change was needed.

“The first two years were an adjustment period, and there were a lot of ups and downs, and a lot of meetings, and me trying to get used to Princeton, and [the team] trying to get used to me, and a lot of challenges,” Litvak said. “COVID gave us an opportunity to sort of reset.”

At Princeton, Litvak faced challenges he hadn’t dealt with at UCLA: a limited number of recruiting spots each year, practice-time restrictions, and an adjustment period to the rigorous demands placed on Princeton’s student-athletes.

Litvak reflected on a conversation he had with Keller Maloney ’23 that helped make that success possible, eying a national championship as the ultimate goal for the program.

“[Keller’s] the one that kind of came to me and said, ‘I want to set our goals and win a national championship,’” Litvak said. “He’s like, let’s just do it and see what happens. And it was a big shift in the way I was going to treat the team, but also how they were gonna approach the training and our entire mindset and everything we did.”

By 2022, men’s water polo formed an identity built on the belief that they too could compete at the highest level, culminating in an 11–10 victory over Stanford, one of the greatest wins in program history. It was the first time that the Tigers had beaten Stanford, and also the first time Stanford had lost to a team from the East Coast.

“In four short years, Dusty built a team that was not only capable of winning but also believed in their capacity to win,” Maloney wrote to the ‘Prince.’ “[The Stanford win] is a crowning endorsement of his abilities to inspire and lead. I will remember hugging him (or maybe closer to tackling him) after that game for the rest of my life.”

“Beating Stanford was incredible. I think that’s probably always going to go down as my number one [favorite moment],” Litvak said.

Though Princeton fell short of winning a national championship in the Litvak era, Princeton made a push to the Final Four in 2023, the deepest run since 2004 and the lone Final Four for the Tigers since the tournament expanded in 2013.

That year, Princeton went 28–6 and was led by Roko Pozaric ’25, finalist for the Cutino Award, and one of the best Tiger water polo players to date.

Pozaric praised Litvak’s coaching for a large part of his development as a player, and the team’s elevation as a whole.

“What separates Dusty is his attention to detail and preparation,” Pozaric wrote to the ‘Prince.’ “Every minute of practice is planned with a purpose, and he makes sure we are prepared for every opponent by understanding their strengths and weaknesses. At the same time, he prepared us for every game as if we were playing in the NCAA final.”

“Dusty constantly adapted to his circumstances to get the most out of every team he coached,” Maloney said of Litvak’s success as a coach.

His trait of adaptability will be crucial in his new role at LMU, where he will now be coaching the women’s program. Litvak most recently coached women’s water polo as the assistant at Princeton before the department separated the programs ahead of the 2024 season. Elingson also served as an assistant on the men’s side until 2024.

“I haven’t recruited on the women’s side in many years,” Litvak said. “So learning our team, our opponents, and then of course, just like the pipeline, it’s a lot.”

By transitioning to LMU, Litvak will have full use of the transfer portal to bring in new talent that he previously did not have at Princeton due to tighter restrictions. Additionally, at LMU he will have access to more recruitment spots to fill his roster.

“Right now, there’s a learning curve, and I’m excited about it because ultimately all it’s going to do is provide more opportunities to strengthen the program and more resources, and so I have to figure out how to navigate it and do the best for our community,” Litvak said.

Litvak’s first game coaching LMU women’s water polo will not take place until 2027, as it is a spring sport. The expectations will remain high, as the Lions have won the regular-season Golden Coast title three seasons in a row and made the NCAA tournament two seasons in a row. Furthermore, LMU remains the only non-Big-Four program to make the NCAA title game (2004) on the women’s side.

“I would have done everything in my power to stay through this fall, and then tried to maybe see any transition as possible after the fall. But that was not unfortunately in the cards,” he said.

As Princeton water polo looks ahead, they face their biggest tests in the new era this weekend, when they host No. 9 Pepperdine and No. 10 San Jose State University at DeNunzio Pool this weekend.

“He worked really hard every single day to put us on the map,” Kovács said. “And he set a culture that is not going to disappear anytime soon… What he left behind is going to last for a long time, that’s for sure.”

Jordan Halagao is an assistant Sports editor for the ‘Prince.’

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