Cal Water Polo: Top-Seeded Bears Determined to Repeat as NCAA Champions

Cal in semifinals Saturday vs. Pacific at Spieker Aquatics Complex on campus.

The Cal men’s water polo team is ranked No. 1 in the country. The Bears have the best collegiate player in the sport, they are defending national champions and they are home for this weekend’s NCAA Championships where the only team to beat them this season is not playing.

What would it mean for Cal to defend its title?

“It’s a special moment for a team,” coach Kirk Everist said. “It’s the difference between a really good team and a great team. This team has the quality to do that.”

THE SCHEDULE: The top-seeded Bears (21-2) open play Saturday at 2 p.m. at Spieker Aquatics Complex against Pacific (22-6), which beat UC Davis 11-7 on Thursday to advance to the tournament semifinals. No. 2 seed UCLA (22-4) will play in the 4 p.m. semifinal against cross-town rival USC (19-6), an 11-8 quarterfinal winner of Princeton.

The championship game is Sunday at 3 p.m.

Jack Deely, a senior attacker who seems headed to his third straight All-America season, said he has been waiting for this moment since he was at San Ramon Valley High School in Danville.

“For me, it would mean kind of everything. It’s the reason I wanted to come back and have the opportunity to be the captain of the team, along with co-captain Marko (Valecic),” Deely says in the video at the top of this story. “I know it means just as much to all the other guys in the pool.”

Nikolaos Papanikolaou prepares to deliver a shot / Photo by Catharyn Hayne, KLC fotos

This team is loaded. It starts with center Nikolaos Papanikolaou, a 6-foot-3, 242-pound powerhouse of a player from Athens, Greece. “Papa,” as his teammates call him, is the reigning national player of the year and last week joined former Stanford star Tony Azevedo as the only players to be named Mountain Pacific Sports Federation player of the year at least three times.

Everist, who has coached the Bears to four of their 15 NCAA water polo crowns, captured two collegiate titles as a player at Cal, was national player of the year in 1988 and twice represented the U.S. in the Olympics.

So he has a breadth of knowledge about the history of the sport at Cal and he believes Papanikolaou has moved alongside Cal alum Chris Humbert, a three-time Olympian and USA Water Polo Hall of Famer, as the program’s best-ever center.

“I’d be hard-pressed to pick somebody that’s better than him,” Everist said. “Obviously, a lot of great players who have come through this program over the years, but he is certainly a special one.

“He’s one of those guys that everybody’s game plan is how to slow him down. If you see the statistics and what he does with everybody gearing everything to stop him, it’s pretty impressive.”

Papanikolaou is not even Cal’s top goal scorer this year — that’s sophomore Max Casabella with 56 goals — but Papanikolaou impacts the game in every way. 

For instance, he leads the MPSF in earned exclusions, meaning that he has forced players to foul him 70 times that sent them to the penalty area. And still he has 53 goals and, by a large margin, leads the conference in an all-purpose category called performance indicator.

It’s Deely’s job, as the top assist man in the MPSF the past two years, to feed he ball to Papa when and where he wants it, even while Papanikolaou is being “pummeled” by defenders, to use Everist’s word.

“He has great vision, incredible hands, he’s a great passer,” Everist said of Deely. “He sees things other players don’t and loves seeing how can he get the ball through that tiny little hole. Pairing him up with Papa is kind of a match made in heaven.”

Deely says Papa makes his job easier. He played center in high school before being moved to the perimeter at Cal, and his experience made the transition easier.

“I knew how a center wants the ball. I understood kind of the sequences in which they wanted it,” Deely explains in the video above. “And once you put it on a guy like (Papa’s) hand, he can make you look good in the stat sheet. Playing with him has been such a blessing.”

The Bears are unbeaten against everyone chosen to the seven-team national championship bracket. Absent is Stanford, which won two of three vs. Cal but was left out of the field after going 5-5 in its final 10 matches.

That means the top-seeded Bears will face Pacific on Saturday rather than an expected fourth meeting against the Cardinal.

“Some might say it’s the easier semifinal but that’s not how we’re going to approach it,” Deely said. “UOP took us to overtime (in a 16-15 Cal win) in our home opener this year. They gave us a run for our money. I’ve got a ton of respect for (them).”

Everist said Pacific will embrace its underdog role.

"There’s a freedom to that. They’ll come out and let it all ride and play extremely hard,” he said. “They have really good talent and players we’re not as quite as familiar with as USC and UCLA.”

Deely isn’t taking any of this for granted. He grew up playing football and rugby and only began his water polo career as a high school freshman year when his family doctor declined to give him medical clearance because of recurring migraines.

His brother Pat is a junior on the Cal rugby team and Jack never misses a game.

Had it not been for the headaches he attributes to football, Deely says he envisions himself playing alongside his brother on the Bears’ rugby team.

“I love rugby,” he says in the video above. “Some of my best friends at Cal are on the rugby team and we all played together all throughout our youth.

“It was heartbreaking to watch those guys climb the ranks and eventually play at Cal, but I figured out my own path.”

Cover photo of Jack Deely by Catharyn Hayne, KLC fotos

Follow Jeff Faraudo of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jefffaraudo