IN SPORTS: LODI WATER POLO ADVANCES
A new season and mentality started on Tuesday for the Lodi High girls water polo team.
Taking on defending San Joaquin Athletic Association champion and intra-district rival Bear Creek in the SacJoaquin Section Division I playoff opener at Tokay High’s swimming pool, No. 8 Lodi defeated the Bruins 13-3. This was the second meeting between the two teams in two months; Lodi beat Bear Creek 13-7 in a nonleague game at the Bruins’ pool on Sept. 4.
“We had a general idea of what was going to happen,” said Lodi coach Robert Elrod of Bear Creek’s offense and defensive schemes. “We just hunkered down on defense and what that would do to their offense, and figure out from there. My girls are pretty smart.”
This is the second consecutive year Lodi opened the playoffs against its Lodi Unified School District rival. In their 2018 opener at Tokay’s pool on Halloween in the same division, No. 7 Lodi posted an 11-6 win over No. 10 Bear Creek.
Advancing to the second round this year, Lodi (14-7) will play at top-seed Davis High (233), which had a first-round bye. Their game will be at River City High of West Sacramento on Thursday at 4 p.m.
Lodi utility player Elisa Grim, a junior, scored the first goal just one minute and four seconds into the opening period of Tuesday’s game. After Flame teammate Aiyana Evans scored at 3:42 to give Lodi a 2-0 lead, Grim closed out the period with two more goals for a 4-0 advantage.
The Flames’ defense helped Grim (six goals) and Evans’ scoring opportunities in the early minutes that included a lot of one-on-one match-ups. That forced Bear Creek into many turnovers at the middle of the pool and near the Flames’ cage.
“That’s what we talked about in our pre-game, right before we broke for the first sprint: Defense first,” said Elrod in the Flames’ discussion before the start of the game. “We’ve been playing really good defense lately.”
Bear Creek coach Michael Heberle added: “Both teams got a lot better. I think at the end of the day, we couldn’t stop Grim. That’s what it came down to.”
Hannah Wilson gave Lodi a 50 lead on a goal at 6:19 in the second period. After the Bruins’ Sidney Banks banked a shot into the corner of the cage to trim the Flames’ lead to 5-1, Lodi scored the next three goals for an 8-2 halftime lead.
Lily Kim and Evans scored only a minute apart for a 7-1 lead. Grim added her fourth goal of the game with only 30 seconds left in the period for an 8-1 advantage. Bear Creek’s Taylor Lemon scored the team’s last goal for the 8-2 score.
After Grim scored her fifth goal to start the third period and upped Lodi’s lead to 9-2, defense became the name of the game for the next six minutes.
“We came out on the spring in the third quarter, anticipating to play defense,” Elrod said.
“When we got the ball on the sprint, Elisa made that cut to go to the cage. We wanted to find her real quick. That was nice to kind of settle everyone down and kind of put them on their heels a little bit.”
The Bruins switched their defensive scheme to playing team defense instead of one player trying to stop Grim and playing one-on-one match-ups.
“No more person to person,” Heberle said. “We did a defensive counter to crash the middle, to shut down the isolate that Grim was creating.”
The Bruins’ strategy worked for the most part in the third period. But Grim found an opening in the Bruins’ defense, and scored again at 17 seconds left in the period for a 10-2 lead.
In the fourth period, Grim, Kim and Evans each scored a goal to finalize the scoring. Evans, a senior who didn’t play in 2018 because of injuries, and Kim each had three goals in the game.
In the cage, Lodi goalie Lydia Campbell had 13 saves. Campbell also had four blocked shots.
Before the start of the season, Lodi scrimmaged Davis, which has won the last three section titles. The Blue Devils are led by Faith Ceruffi, a senior who has more than 80 goals this season. Davis’ goalie in Maddie Walker, only a sophomore, has more than 100 saves this season. Davis has won a combined 15 section blue banners since 2000.
“It’s a different animal against Davis,” Elrod said. “They just have wave after wave of girls. They play a brutal schedule. There is a reason why they have won so many section titles. If you want to win one, you have to go through them. That is the mentality we’ve taken.”