FLAMES BEAT TIGERS IN THE POOL
The Lodi High girls water polo team already had second place in the Tri-City Athletic League, but the Flames put an exclamation mark on that finish with Tuesday’s 12-2 victory over cross-town rival Tokay.
The Flames spread the scoring among five players, with Elisa Grim leading the way at five.
“So we were already locked into second place in our league. Where that puts us in the grand scheme of things, a far as who we play, I don’t know,” Lodi coach Robert Elrod said. “The Section does that whole power rankings, who you beat, who you lost to. We just do the best that we can.”
The Flames lead 3-1 after the first quarter after two goals from Grim and one from Lily Kim, then scored five unanswered goals in the second quarter to lead 8-1 at halftime.
After another three Lodi goals in the third quarter, the teams went 1-1 in the final frame.
“Now that it’s done I feel good, but there is still a few things we need to work on for ourselves, so I was kind of hoping that we’d get into some situations, which we did,” Elrod said. “Our player advantage was not very good, we need to tighten that up. We like the way our defense is, our offense is starting to clean itself up, we’ve been working on that a lot.”
Grim finished with five goals, Hannah Wilson added three, Aiyana Evans had two and Kim and Madison Rishwain had one each. Violet Young and Sophie Smith had one goal each for Tokay.
Boys
The boys game between Lodi and Tokay was a closer affair, with the Flames exiting the pool with a 20-14 victory.
The star of the victory was Victor Plunkett, who put the ball in the net 15 times.
“We’ve had some games like that,” Lodi coach Dan Christy said about the high-scoring game. “Weren’t expecting it out of Tokay, but they came to play, and we came out a little lax. They played us a lot better than last time we played.”
Eli Kim added three goals for the Flames, along with one each from Braden Endter and Dane Cranford. Shane McCay tallied six steals for Lodi, and Sam Meyers had 10 blocks in the cage.
Lodi finishes tied with Lincoln for second place in the TCAL at 7-3. Lodi holds the tiebreaker for the second spot, since the Flames beat Lincoln by two and Lincoln beat Lodi by one.
The next step for Lodi is the Sac-Joaquin Section playoffs.
“I was feeling pretty decent until tongiht. We totally had a breakdown on defense, but this is the first itme in two weeks I’ve had the whole team together through being sick and things going on,” Christy said. “We had a really great practice, so hopefully we can get our stuff together by this time next week when we get into the playoffs. We’ll def have to play better than we did tonight.”