Boys Water Polo Sports

Andover Water Polo’s Strong Defensive Play Leads To Another Win

Continuing his strong goalscoring season, Marek Deveau ’23 (pictured above) scored three goals against Choate.

With a number of impressive defensive plays and blocks from players such as Ryan Chandor ’23, Andover Boys Water Polo beat Choate 11-8 on Saturday. The team’s record now stands at 5-3. 

 

According to Co-Captain James Isenhower ’22, the team did well with matching Choate’s energy, something that they have been able to do well in games throughout the season.

 

Isenhower said, “I think we did a good job of matching Choate I would say. In the end we were able to pull away from them, but we’ve done a really good job this season of playing up to our opponent even if they’re strong, even if they have a better record than us. I think we’ve always been able to do a good job of matching their energy in the water and being able to be as aggressive as they are.”

 

According to Trey Wolfe ’23 and Marcel Montemayor ’23, the team’s defense excelled, especially towards the end of the game, which led to scoring chances at the other end of the pool.

 

“I thought that especially at the end of the game the defense did a phenomenal job. Stopping shots from happening makes my life a lot easier because if the shot never reaches the goal then I don’t need to get in front of it. Our defense did a really good job towards the end of the game of shutting them down, I think it frustrated them. That’s where we capitalized,” Wolfe said.

 

In an email to The Phillipian, Montemayor wrote, “Prior to the game we emphasized working on our defense, and all of that hard work paid off because it was the defense that really won us that game. I think our offense is also in a strong place, but something we really need to work on is setting up our 6 on 5 defense and offense. Choate was able to capitalize on multiple easy mistakes that we made.”

 

 

According to Isenhower, it was impressive to see the team display so much energy even during the fourth quarter, which gave them the upper hand over Choate.

 

Isenhower said, “In the fourth quarter, I’m always impressed by how much energy we as a team have left. Like I said, Andover has a pretty big swim program and that’s how we get most of our water polo players, from swimmers who want to stay in the water in the fall and try out water polo. That means that we naturally have a pretty high level of conditioning and it always makes you proud to see in the fourth quarter that none of our boys are getting tired and they’re always giving 110%. Never giving up, it doesn’t matter how far we are ahead or how far we are behind, we’re always giving it our all. Especially in the fourth quarter yesterday, I saw a lot of good efforts from people like Ryan Chandor, who in the fourth quarter capitalized off of how tired our opponents were.”

 

According to Wolfe, the team has made a lot of progress since the start of the season.

 

Wolfe said, “We progressed so much as a team and we’ve become so much better at being coordinated on offense and defense that these past couple of weeks have been shocking as to how far we’ve come. I think we’ve done a really good job so far. ”

 

Andover Boys Water Polo’s next game will be away on Saturday against Brunswick.