#1 UCLA Men’s Water Polo Crushes #9 UC San Diego And #14 Cal Baptist, Plays Three Games Today

The UCLA Men’s Water Polo team opened its season yesterday in the Triton Invitational. The Bruins played a doubleheader where they faced UC San Diego in the early afternoon and then Cal Baptist in the late afternoon.

Despite the fact that UC San Diego is ranked 9th and Cal Baptist is 14th, the Bruins easily defeated both teams by a score of 13-6 and 14-4, respectively.

The pair of wins extended UCLA’s winning streak to 35 games, which is second-longest in school history. The only longer streak was from 1964-1968 and it spanned 50 games.

Ryder Roberts scored the first goal of the game against UC San Diego, but the Tritons tied it up shortly thereafter.

The first quarter ended with UCLA ahead 2-1. Including the tiebreaking goal, UCLA went on a 10-1 run which started in the first quarter and lasted until the third and there was no coming back from that for the Tritons. Max Irving posted a hat trick for the Bruins.

The nitecap against Cal Baptist was much of the same for the Bruins, except in the one it was Ryder Roberts who led UCLA in scoring with four goals. The Bruins scored three unanswered goals in the first quarter. They added four more in the second quarter and led 7-2 at halftime. That proved to be a deficit Cal Baptist could not comeback from as the Bruins cruised to a 14-4 final score.

Today, the Bruins host the UCLA Invitational, not on campus in Westwood, but at Cathedral HS in San Diego. UCLA will play three matches today. They face Redlands this morning at 9am. Then they take on the LMU Lions at 11:40 am and a scrimmage with Stanford at 2:20 pm. They will close out the Invitational with a match against Chapman at 3:30 pm.

Hopefully, the team will extend its winning streak to 38 games after today.

Go Bruins!!!