UHS Boy’s Varsity Water Polo suffered a loss against Beckman High on Oct. 13. Throughout the game, UHS was right on Beckman’s tail, but ultimately lost 11-15.

Regardless of the outcome, the team put up a close fight even when Beckman led the first half from the very start by scoring the first couple of points. However, UHS quickly escalated the intensity and mounted a comeback, leading for a short amount of time before Beckman regained their lead for the rest of the game. 

While UHS set out to win, many challenges came with the tough Beckman team. 

“The challenge we had to overcome during the game was definitely Beckman’s defensive showing coming right out of the gate,” junior captain Oleg Shatskikh said. “We overcame it by communicating as a team, [allowing] us to break down their defensive and score the goals.”

Shatskikh explained that strong communication between the players was a UHS strength in this game. Despite the huge turnout of the crowd and the subsequent chatter, players were still focused on the game, maintaining constant communication throughout. 

While there were many positive attributes in the game, there were also some weaknesses throughout. For example, turnovers that could have been avoided occurred multiple times throughout the game, and these mistakes ultimately contributed to the loss.

“Some weaknesses we had were turnovers . . . which were from bad passes or unawareness,” Shatskikh said. “Many of the field players throughout the game had the ball several times, and with the intensity of the game, there were many penalty shots.”

Even though the result was not what the team had hoped for, they left the game with a positive attitude, with plans and hopes to win against Beckman the next time they face off.

“We plan on coming out hard in Beckman and working as a team rather than a collection of players . . . [then] growing on the successes that we had,” senior Joshua Chen said.