Cal Water Polo Set To Move Past Obstacles in Pursuit of a Third Straight NCAA title

Coach Kirk Everist expected his Cal water polo team’s quest for a third consecutive NCAA title would be the toughest season. After all, he’s been here before.

Everist’s 2006 and ’07 teams won national titles but could not make it three in a row in 2008.

Cal actually has won three straight NCAA titles in the sport twice: From 1973-75 under legendary coach Pete Cutino and from 1990-92 with his successor, Steve Heaston.

Two other times the Bears won back-to-back crowns, including in 1987 and ’88 when their star player was Everist, twice an All-American and the national player of the year as a senior.

Aside from rugby, which has won 26 national titles, including 12 straight from 1991 through 2002, no other Cal program has assembled a national championship three-peat.

Everist’s team (21-5) is seeded No. 2 in the eight-team NCAA tournament that gets under way Friday at USC’s Uytengsu Aquatics Center. Cal opens the three-day, single-elimination event against Fordham (24-7) at 4 p.m.

“I thought at the beginning of the year this was going to be the hardest one,” he said. “We’re getting a lot of energy from other teams as far as their commitment against us.”

That much was expected. The Bears beat USC in the national championship game the past two seasons, returned with most of their roster intact and spent a large portion of this season ranked No. 1.

Everist expects a good showing this weekend from his squad.

“It’s a very small variance between these teams,” he said, referring to No 1 seed UCLA and No. 3 USC. “A lot of it comes down to execution and poise in the critical moments and we have a lot of experience there so I anticipate the guys to step up. I don’t think we’ve seen our best game yet.”

There’s a couple reasons for that.

The Bears faced unexpected obstacles, including a thumb injury to senior Nikolaos Papanikolaou, which kept the two-time national player of the year and five-time all-Mountain Pacific Sports Federation star out of the pool for nine games.

Further complicating things was All-America goalkeeper Adrian Weinberg missing a month while training and competing with the U.S. national team at the Pan American Games.

Papanikolaou returned to action two weeks ago and is “as good as he’s going to get,” according to Everist.

“I’d say he’s about 95 percent. He’s mentally gotten to the point where he kind of knows what it feels like,” Everist said. “I expect to kind of be at the top of his game for the weekend, for sure.”

Despite missing more than a third of the season, Papanikolaou led the MPSF with 69 earned exclusions, an indication of the aggressive approach opponents use to try slowing down the 6-foot-3, 242-pound native of Athens, Greece.

“It does say a lot,” Everist said of that particular statistic. “Pretty much when the ball comes in, they’re just gang-tackling him and taking the ejection, taking their chances.”

Papanikolaou also ranks second in the conference in performance indicator, a metric that bundles a range of statistics to create something of a plus-minus rating.

In 17 games, he scored 37 goals, giving him 247 for his Cal career, second in program history. Chris Humbert scored 296 from 1998 through 2001.

The Bears’ top three scorers are all Spaniards: juniors Max Casabella with 58 goals and Roberto Valera with 52, and sophomore Albert Ponderrada with 37.

Valera, who scored the game-winning goal in last year’s NCAA title game, also leads the Bears with 54 assists. However, he must sit out the Bears’ first two NCAA games as the result of a foul in the MPSF tournament.

In their games without Papanikolaou, the Bears filled his center position with Jordi Gascon, George Avakian and Piero Arienti. Everist said they handled the assignment capably.

“It was a little disjointed, but we were able to establish a presence inside and that allowed us to not have to really change how we play,” Everist explained.

One final distraction was a side effect of the COVID era, as the Bears have eight redshirt seniors who utilized the extra season the NCAA afforded athletes as a result of the pandemic.

Some of those players will graduate in a couple weeks and most of them are about to join the job market. As a result, they not only had to juggle water polo and classes but also job searches and interviews.

“Life gets in the way,” Everist conceded. “I don’t think I truly understood that dynamic where we were sometimes a little distracted.”

His players pretty much have all those decisions made and are ready to focus on a three-day climax to their Cal water polo careers.

"I feel like if we play our best game, we’re going to be hard to beat,” Everist said. “These teams can certainly do it, but if we play our best game and play together and play with poise, we’re going to be a tough out.

“I’ll take my chances with these guys.”

Note: Times indicated on the NCAA tournament bracket below are EST:

Cover photo of Cal senior Nikolaos Papanikolaou by Catharyn Hayne, KLC fotos

Follow Jeff Faraudo of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jefffaraudo