#3 UCLA Men’s Water Polo Visits #4 Stanford in Critical MPSF Matchup

This afternoon, one of the few bright spots left in UCLA Athletics jumps back into the pool when #3 UCLA travels to Palo Alto to face #4 Stanford. Today’s game is an important one. As an MPSF matchup, it will help determine seeding for the MPSF Tournament that is just two weeks away, which in turn will decide which teams from the conference make the NCAA Tournament this year.

A win by UCLA today would go a long way towards earning a higher seed. At this point, I would expect defending National Champion UC Berkeley to earn the #1 seed in the MPSF Tournament, assuming they can defeat Southern Cal this morning, and I would expect UCLA to get the #2 seed if they can beat Stanford today and Southern Cal next weekend.

Meanwhile, last weekend, UCLA held on to defeat #5 Pacific 12-11. The Bruins took a 3-1 lead in the first quarter and a 7-4 lead at the half. UCLA expanded their lead to 11-5 in the third quarter. The fourth quarter started with two goals by the Tigers before Alex Roelse scored what would be the game-winner with a little more than 4:30 to play to make it 12-7. In the last four minutes of the game, Pacific scored 4 consecutive goals to cut the UCLA lead to just one, but it was too little, too late as the Bruins held on for the victory.

Matt Farmer had four goals in the game to lead all scorers while Roelse also added a hat trick for the Bruins. Max Irving had two goals while Chasen Travisano, Quinten Osborne and Nicolas Saveljic all scored once each.


Go Bruins!!