No. 18 Santa Clara Comes Home Against UC Santa Cruz This Sunday

Oct. 11, 2007

The Santa Clara men's water polo team returns home this Sunday, October 14th, to take on UC Santa Cruz in the Bronco's second home game of the season. The team is riding a five game winning streak coming into the matchup and looks to extend it to six in front of a great Santa Clara crowd.

After this past weekend, the team seems to have overcome one of the biggest obstacles facing them earlier in the year: winning close games. The 8-7 win against #20 Brown and the 9-7 win over Cal Lutheran last Sunday were the closest wins the Broncos have pulled out all year, and both coming on the same day. "We've had plenty of wins by a large margin," said head coach Keith Wilbur. "But it was huge to get some close wins like that. The guys are getting more and more confident in what they're able to do."

Earlier in the season, Santa Clara defeated UC Santa Cruz 16-7 to finish out the NorCal open, but Wilbur says that won't necessarily be the case this time. "Santa Cruz has gotten better and better each time I've seen them play since we beat them," said Wilbur. "They have a young team, a new coach, and they're still learning to play together. I expect to see a different team than the one we saw earlier in the year."

That's not to say that Santa Clara hasn't been improving as well. Since the beginning of the season, different players have stepped up and played big for the Broncos. Josh Early was just recently named the WWPA Player of the Week for his efforts in the Convergence Classic. Early scored 12 goals in four wins for the team last weekend coming off the bench and has 34 on the year.

Tommy Hendrickson and Liam Farrell are the other two parts of the big three scorers on the team. Hendrickson leads the team with 38 and Farrell has 31.

"Having those three guys that can go off on any given night is great, so teams can't key in on one guy and try and shut him down," said Wilbur. "But if teams do end up doing that, or if one of them has an off night, we have a bunch of other guys who can step up and score as well."

It's not all about the scoring though. Robert Callahan has been a force in the goal this season, especially as of late. His 182 blocks for the year put him 3rd in the nation in that category. "Rob had a great year last year and he's definitely continued it this year," said Wilbur. "It kind of gets taken for granted sometimes to have a goalie that is as solid as Rob is every single game, but it's just a great thing to have."

Luke Oda may not fill up the stat sheet as far as scoring, but he's proven to be an integral part of the team with his tough, physical play. "Luke draws kickouts for us left and right," said Wilbur. "Sometimes that goes unnoticed, but he creates a ton of opportunities for our offense."

Wilbur also contributed a great deal of the team's success so far to the great defense of Tommy Kelly, who has also quietly become the team's fourth leading scorer, Andrew Fitch, and newcomer Mitchell Klipa.

There are still improvements and changes to be made coming into the game though. "We still need to work on creating better opportunities for ourselves," said Wilbur. "And we love playing at home, it fires us up, but the strengths of our team don't necessarily translate into playing in a smaller pool. We have to make adjustments."

The game is this Sunday at 12:00 p.m. in Malley Pool at Santa Clara University.