CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The No. 14-ranked Princeton University men’s water polo team headed to Cambridge, Mass. on a mission. The Tigers needed to pick up two wins in order to win a share of the Northeast Water Polo Conference (NWPC) regular season title. They also needed to defeat the No. 17 Harvard University Crimson by two goals or more in order to secure the tournament’s top seed in the conference tournament and did just that.
Princeton battled it out with the Crimson and took a 12-9 victory followed by a 19-10 dominant win over the Division III No. 10 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Engineers to wrap up the regular season. The Tigers finished with a 9-1 record in NWPC play, earn the regular season crown courtesy a goal differential tiebreaker compared to Harvard and turn their focus to the conference tournament which will be hosted by Brown University on Friday-Sunday, November 21-23, with NWPC title and automatic berth to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Championship at stake.
Facing Harvard – which downed the Tigers by a 13-12 score on October 5 in Princeton – the Tigers earned an early exclusion and Otto Stothart found the back of the cage for the first goal of the game. Taylor Bell scored two minutes later in a defensive battle to put Princeton up two.
Harvard put away a shot with just 12 seconds left in the quarter but the Tigers responded. Bell scored once again to open the second frame followed by goals from JP Ohl and Stothart for a four goal lead.
The Crimson scored back to back tallies, but Kristóf Kovács held Harvard to three goals in the first half.
Princeton came out swinging in the third quarter with Stothart scoring his third goal of the game. Although Harvard scored as well, the Tigers put up a five goal third quarter to pull ahead for good.
Stothart and Logan McCarroll both recorded goals in the final quarter to ice the game, claim a 12-9 win and secure a goal differential advantage in the season series with Harvard.
Stothart’s four goals led the offense for the Tigers and Kovács racked up 14 saves in the cage, his 15th double digit save performance of the season. Bell and Ohl both tacked on pairs of scores with Gavin Appeldorn, Finn LeSieur, Enrique Nuño and McCarroll contributing solo tallies.
Looking to clinch the NWPC tournament’s top seed, Princeton faced its final challenge in the Engineers of MIT.
MIT struck first, but McCarroll evened the score at one apiece. The Engineers scored again but then the Tigers were off to the races as the squad notched five unanswered goals from four different scorers.
With five seconds on the clock, MIT found the back of the cage as the score stood at 6-3 after the first quarter.
Princeton came out firing in the second quarter, scoring five goals. Kovács shutout the Engineers to finish off the quarter before Pierre du Plessis took over in the second half.
The Tigers tacked on eight goals in the second half on the way to its fifth consecutive 20 win season. Princeton’s 19 goals were scored by McCarroll (four), Ádám Peocz (three), Appeldorn (two), Luka Franulovic (two), Luke Johnston, LeSieur, Nuño, Ohl, William Swart, Bhavan Aulakh, Hayk Yengibaryan and Nathan Banos.
Kovács (three) and du Plessis (five) combined for eight saves in the victory.
Information courtesy Princeton University Athletics Communications
