Warrior water polo finishes league, regular season with winning records

Fallbrook High School’s boys water polo team finished both Avocado League play and the 2007 regular season with winning records.

The Warriors had a 5-3 Avocado League mark to place third in the conference standings and ended the regular season with an 11-9 overall mark.

“We finished where we were supposed to. You always want to do better than you’re supposed to, but we gave Carlsbad and Vista some real good games,” said Fallbrook coach Michael Hatcher.

“We improved from last year,” Hatcher said. “The W’s didn’t come from it, but definitely we’re better than last year.”

The 2006 Warriors were 5-5 in Avocado League play to finish fourth and closed out the regular season with a 12-15 record. The 2006 team ended its regular season with a 20-3 loss against Carlsbad, the same school which beat the Warriors to conclude the 2007 regular season.

Carlsbad finished 2007 with an 8-0 Avocado League record, but the Warriors didn’t lose the league finale by as lopsided a margin as they did in 2006. “It was a close game up until probably halfway through the third quarter,” Hatcher said. “We were only down by two or three goals for the majority of the first half.”

Fallbrook lost games to Vista, who finished second in the league, by one goal and two goals. The Warriors also lost a non-league match against Westview by one goal and lost to Poway by a three-goal margin. “We had probably a half-dozen one-goal games, one and two goal games, that we lost,” Hatcher said.

During the regular season Fallbrook scored 210 goals while allowing only 154. “I know our strength is just our awareness of the game,” Hatcher said. “I think our defense is really strong. We played all the top teams in San Diego and we were in every single game.”

Hatcher believes that outside shooting is the area with the greatest opportunity for improvement. “In the games against the top teams, the difference in the game was making a couple of shots,” he said.