Traveling abroad with friend who graduated from Cal. Enjoyed sharing this story with him at breakfast this morning.

Ags won the regular season conference title with a 9-7 win over UCSD this afternoon in San Diego. That gives them the No. 1 seed in the conference tourney. Winner of the conference tourney gets an NCAA bid. Second place goes home for Thanksgiving.

Ags and Tritons have battled for the conference title for the last few years. They have played three times this season (twice in tournament play) with the Tritons winning both of the earlier meetings. All matches have been close.

Conference tournament will be Nov. 22nd-24th at Cal Baptist in Riverside. NCAA's are December 7th and 8th at the University of the Pacific. There are "play-in" matches on November 30th and on December 4th or 5th. Winner of the WWPA (Davis' conference) will probably have a play-in on the 4th or 5th.

Go Ags!

Top seeded UCD (10th nationally) easily defeated 8th seed Fresno Pacific in the first round of the WWPA Men's Water Polo championship. Ags will play 4th seed California Baptist (17th nationally) , a 12-6 winner over host and 5th seed Concordia, in a semi-final game tomorrow.

Age advance to tomorrow’s WWPA Men’s Final with a 14-9 victory over Cal Baptist. They will play the winner of the other semi-final (Duh!!) which features Santa Clara against UCSD.

For what seems like the hundredth year in a row, Ags will play UCSD in the WWPA final. UCSD narrowly defeated Santa Clara 7-6 in their semi-final match. Santa Clara has been the surprise team of the tourney. They entered as the sixth seed, upset LMU in OT in a first round match and lost to UCSD by only one goal.

Go Ags!

Ags beat the Tritons rather convincingly, 14-5. This will mean an NCAA bid, though like basketball, water polo has a few "play-in" games before they get to the final four in a couple of weeks.

WWPA regular season AND tournament champions!

Go Ags!

UCD will play Pepperdine in an "Opening Round" game on December 5th at UOP. Winner will play host Pacific in a semi-final on the 7th. Pepperdine is 24-7 on the year and won the Golden Coast conference tournament. Ags and Waves have not played each other this year.

USC and UOP received at-large bids even though they each did not do well in their respective conference tournaments. Stanford, Harvard and Bucknell are also in the tournament.

https://www.ncaa.com/brackets/print/waterpolo-men/nc/2019

Go Ags!

Why does men's water polo have such a weird championship bracket structure?

Just guessing, but relatively minor sport, limited geographical participation, historically the sport has been dominated by the four major California universities. For a long time the entire tournament was just four teams; the winner of the MPSF (think Pac-12 and at one time Big West), the winner of the WWPA, a team from the east coast, and an at-large which was typically the runner up in the MPSF. Several teams (mostly Big West and West Coast Conference schools) broke away from the MPSF, I can only assume because of the domination by the big four Pac-12 schools, and created the Golden Coast Conference. They now get an auto-bid. The very first "Opening Round" or "Play-in" game is now on the Saturday following Thanksgiving and features two east coast teams.

Several small schools left the WWPA a few years ago and play in the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. Those are the same small schools, mostly the Clarement, Whittier, Mudd, Pomona-Pitzer schools that play in that conference for other sports. As of 2019 they no longer participate in the NCAA tournament. Men's water polo, like men's volleyball, only has the one tournament, theoretically open to all divisions. There is no seperate NCAA sanctioned tournament for what are otherwise D-II and D-III schools. A seperate organization, US Water Polo, is sanctioning a tournament for NCAA Div. III level schools for the first time this year. There are only a handful of D-II schools that play water polo.

But then, this is all a guess on my part.

Age lost to Pepperdine, 15-12, in their opening round match this afternoon.