Bucknell University Athletics
Bison Voices - Mark Masterson, Men's Water Polo
9/15/2006 8:00:00 AM | Men's Water Polo
Sept. 15, 2006
The preparation for this fall season began last June for myself and most of my teammates. Everyone was training and playing water polo so we could come back to campus in shape and ready to go in mid-August. In early August we got together as a team in Northern California and did a week of training on our own without our coaches. This was a great week spent on the delta; we got to play a lot of water polo, but also got out on (teammate) Lee Anderson's ski boat and get frothy on the wakeboard and tubes. This was a great week for the freshmen to get to know the rest of the team and also get in some solid polo.
We got back to campus on August 15 and jumped right in to full preseason training the next morning. For the first two weeks of preseason we trained about six hours a day and had meetings at night after dinner. The rest of the time was spent sleeping. Intense preseason training came to end as classes started and the rest of Bucknell arrived back on campus.
Our first weekend of competition was Labor Day weekend. The weekend was very big for our team because we had all been looking forward to finally playing against new competition rather than ourselves. We were matched up against Queens, No. 18 Santa Clara, No. 1 Cal Berkeley and MIT. We began with Queens where we were very successful. Everyone on our team played significant minutes and a lot of the freshmen scored their first goals in collegiate water polo. The next game was against Santa Clara, which was one position behind us in the rankings. Everyone on the team was very pumped to match up against a West coast team, but unfortunatley the power went out so we had to wait an extra four hours to go up against the Broncos. We came out a little shaky in the first half, but settled down in the second with a great defensive effort and pulled out the victory 9-8, a big win for the team. The next morning we got right back into it, and for the second straight season played the No. 1 team in the nation. They beat us by 10, but it was a good game because we learned what we needed to work on for the following weekend. We finished the weekend up with a victory over MIT.
This past weekend we had our first home games of the season, including two big contests against No. 20 Johns Hopkins, a perennial rival, and No. 14 St. Francis, last year's Eastern Champions. The Hopkins game was also our first league contest and critical to one of our goals at going undefeated in league play to earn a top seed for Southern Championships, which will be played at Kinney Natatorium. Everyone showed up at Kinney Saturday morning ready to play. We controlled play in the first quarter and continued to roll in the second quarter. The second half of play was a little shaky, but everyone came through and we took a 14-11 win. Later in the day we played Gannon and the University of Toronto and won both of those games as well. Sunday morning we had perhaps our biggest test of the season to date as we took on St. Francis. The game was very close through all four quarters and we executed our game plan well, but a few shots barred out and some 50/50 plays went the other way. We lost 13-11 but again learned what it will take to defeat that team. Hopefully in two weeks we will see St. Francis again at ECACs at Brown, but that is before we have a huge game against Brown in the morning. Go Bison!
