Water polo: the start of the quest

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. -- Over the past week, the U.S. women's water polo team has played Hungary in four exhibitions up and down the state of California, the Americans winning all four, the last a 9-4 victory Sunday that was way more physical than the final score would indicate before a happy, flag-waving crowd of about 1,000 people at Corona del Mar High School. Afterward, the American players signed autographs and posed for photos -- there were dozens and dozens of little girls in the crowd -- and, under a postcard-perfect Southern California sky, the NBC cameras beamed it all out on live TV.

It was, as Olympic send-offs go, about as good as it gets.

Three weeks from Monday, the U.S. team opens round-robin play at the 2012 Games against -- Hungary.

Since 2000, the Americans have done it all in water polo, won everything there is to win, except for Olympic gold.

This game Sunday was, in a sense, the beginning of the end of the journey. It was also, in a way, the start of the quest.

These four games against Hungary mean everything and nothing.

When the history of this U.S. team is written, no one is particularly apt to remember this four-game set. The Americans won the first game, last Monday, up in Palo Alto, 17-8; the second game, on the Fourth of July, back down in Southern California, at Los Alamitos, 14-8; and game three on Friday in San Diego, 7-6.

The games were all different. The Americans were ahead in some games, behind in others, and figured out a way to win all four games.

Along with the undeniable benefit of being on national TV -- that, ultimately, is the value of this series: they figured out a way to win.

Sunday's game was broken open early in the third quarter, when Maggie Steffens scored twice and Kami Craig once. What was once a tight game was suddenly 7-3.

But the revealing lesson in how smart this U.S. team can be came on the sequence that led to the next goal. With time winding down on the 30-second shot clock, Brenda Villa, who along with Heather Petri has played on every American Olympic team since 2000, fired a skip shot that left Hungarian goaltender Flora Bolonyai -- a current All-American at USC -- no option but to stop it in a way that it rolled out of play behind her. That gave the Americans the ball, and another 30 seconds. Elsie Windes got off another shot that led to another re-set -- which led, finally, to a goal by Kelly Rulon, making it 8-3 midway through the third.

"It's good to play a series of four games and good to be reminded of how quickly things can change," goalie Betsey Armstrong said, adding a moment later, "You have to remember to play your own game."

Until July 22, when they leave for London, the Americans will be practicing at their home base at Los Alamitos -- with one break. On Monday night, they're heading as a group to Las Vegas; on Tuesday, they're due to watch the U.S. men's basketball team practice and meet with head coach Mike Krzyzewski.

About a year ago, Rulon had bought Krzyzewski's 2009 book, "The Gold Standard," about the 2008 U.S. men's basketball team. It has since been widely read on the water polo team, coach Adam Krikorian said.

Krikorian, who coached at UCLA and knows the John Wooden story well, said that perhaps the U.S. women will glean some "words of wisdom or any kind of inspiration" from Krzyzewski.

Then again, this meeting might turn out to be a two-way street. Seven players on that men's basketball team will be Olympic newbies. They might want to hear what Brenda Villa and Heather Petri have to say, too.

"It's really cool," Petri said, "to feel this level of confidence that our teammates have right now. It's empowering us as well," meaning the two of them. "We felt it. We know what's ahead of us. To see them acknowledging it, and being empowered by it, is really exciting."

"It's our time"

LOS ANGELES -- In Sydney 12 years ago, the U.S. women's water polo team took silver when the Aussies scored to win gold with 1.3 seconds remaining. In Athens in 2004, the Americans took bronze.

Four years ago in Beijing, the U.S. women again took second, this time when the Dutch scored the winning goal with 26 seconds to go.

These are the facts that everyone associated with the U.S. women's water polo knows by heart. This is why, when the 13-player U.S. team was announced Thursday at a ceremony at the LA 84 Foundation, the legacy building from the Summer Games here 28 years ago, the rah-rah video closed with this tag-line: "It's our time."

Time will tell, of course, whether this U.S. team will do what the three that came before it could not, whether it can meet the challenge coach Adam Krikorian has long set, which he reiterated Thursday in public, to rise to "competitive greatness."

He said, "It's about bringing your best when your best is needed."

What sets this team apart is that it is, truly, a team.

Under Krikorian, who took over after Beijing from Guy Baker, the players have come together to form a remarkably close bond.

Their unity could have come apart after the U.S. team got drilled at the 2011 world championships in Shanghai, the Americans ultimately finishing sixth.

Instead, they rebounded. At the Pan American Games a couple months later in Guadalajara, Mexico, they not only won to claim their Olympic qualifying spot, they did so in astonishing fashion, rallying from three goals down at halftime to knock off Canada for the gold medal in a penalty shootout. The final score: 27-26.

"We learned at the world championships how not to deal with adversity," Krikorian said, adding a moment later, "Two months later, we showed how to deal with adversity."

Goalie Betsey Armstrong may be the best in the world. She deflects such praise, saying Thursday: "I know these girls have my back. I have their back. It's a genuine relationship."

Heather Petri was one of the shooters in that Guadalajara penalty drama. "No nerves," she said. "It was awesome."

Petri and Brenda Villa will now be four-time Olympians. They will have been on all four U.S. water polo teams since 2000; that's when the International Olympic Committee opened the Games to women.

Villa, 32, was introduced Thursday as captain of the 2012 team. She has done it all with the exception of that gold medal. Indeed, she was named the FINA magazine female water polo player of decade for the years 2000-10.

Petri, who turns 34 in a month, said the medal can't become a grail unto itself. "It's attainable," she said but cautioning, "You stop making it about that." It's the journey, the practices, the time together, she said, calling the time between Beijing and London -- despite a serious injury -- "the lightest of my four years" and saying, "I find joy in the smallest little things."

Two sisters made the team: Jessica and Maggie Steffens. Jessica played on the 2008 team. Maggie turns 19 in two weeks. Jessica graduated from Stanford in 2009. Maggie starts there after the London Games.

There were no surprises in the roster unveiled Thursday. This was the team Krikorian has been going with for several months now.

It's a defensive-minded team.

It's a deep team.

It's a team that -- despite the presence of Villa -- doesn't rely on one outsized star to carry the load. On any given day, anybody on the U.S. team can beat you. That makes this team hard to scout, and difficult to prepare for.

NBC is prepared to show a lot of this team -- even before the Games, including a July 8 nationally televised game against Hungary to be played at Corona (Calif.) del Mar High School.

"We understand that on any given day," Krikorian said, "we can lose."

Then again, he said, and you know what he has to be thinking, "We can win."

U.S. women's water polo: the crucible of 2011

If, next summer in London, the U.S. women's water polo team wins Olympic gold, it will be because of the crucible of 2011. At the quarterfinals of the world championships in Shanghai, the U.S. women endured a brutal loss to Russia. Then, a couple days ago, at the championships of the Pan Am Games in Guadalajara, with an Olympic berth on the line, they pulled out an epic victory.

Rallying from four goals down midway through the third period, the Americans managed to tie the game at 8-8 the end of regulation. That was followed by the two standard overtime periods; no scores. Time for a shootout.

Five shots.

Ten.

Fifteen.

Still no winner.

Mind you, that was because the Americans -- with one block -- kept making shots. But so -- with one block, by American goalie Betsey Armstrong -- did the Canadians.

Brenda Villa, 31, an attacker who not only has been to three Olympic Games on the U.S. team but is the FINA Magazine female water polo player of the last decade, nailed four -- count 'em, four -- shots herself.

"Just going up there to shoot -- it's for your team so you have to lose all your thoughts so you don't get too nervous," she said. "It's just business."

Finally, it came to this: 18-year-old attacker Maggie Steffens nailed yet another shot for the Americans. The Canadians missed.

The final score, and this was water polo, not football: 27-26.

The Americans converted 19 of 20 opportunities in the shootout. That's just plain gutsy.

"It was crazy," said Courtney Mathewson, another American attacker. "We prevailed because we believe in ourselves. There is no panic when we are down by three or four. I think we believed in each other and that was the difference."

Adam Krikorian, the U.S. coach, said, "I told the girls this is the greatest game I've ever been a part of -- maybe the most courageous, most mentally tough group of girls during one game that I've ever seen.

In the celebrations on the pool deck and afterward there was this:

Two months ago -- it's not clear the Americans would have won this game.

In Shanghai, up 6-2 in the third period against Russia in the quarterfinals, the Americans gave up five straight goals, lost 9-7 and then ended up finishing sixth at the worlds.

It was dispiriting and disheartening -- and yet exactly, in a weird way, perhaps what this team needed.

After the 2008 Games, the women's team switched gears, Krikorian taking over as coach from Guy Baker. The team, though, kept on winning, and winning, and winning -- over the years everything except Olympic gold.

The U.S. women took silver in Sydney in 2000, bronze in Athens in 2004, silver again in Beijing in 2008.

Krikorian, at the beginning of 2011, put his charges through what was essentially a boot camp. He promised it would toughen them up physically and mentally. Physically, there was no doubt -- several of them swimming lap times faster than ever before.

The loss in Shanghai could have swung things two ways.

It could have turned the team against Krikorian. After all, that loss was the first meaningful defeat for the U.S. team in a long time.

Instead -- everyone came home and doubled down. Together.

All in. Players, staff, coaches.

With buy-in, anything and everything becomes possible.

In Shanghai, "I don't think we were united there as a team yet," Villa said. "Not buying in but having complete faith in each other. It showed [against Canada]. It's great to come together and do that, and as we move forward it's only going to get -- our bond, it's only going to get stronger."

Armstrong, the team's No. 1 goalie, added, "It's easy to say now that we won this game that it's the case but leading up to this tournament it motivated this time to connect. It's almost a cliché that it was the best thing to happen to us but it is It was the motivating factor for us to come together as a group to work hard in the pool."

Krikorian echoed, "When you continue to win, it's easy to put things that are important on the back burner. When you finally face defeat and stare it down and chew on it for two, two and a half months, it makes you re-evaluate things, staff included.

"It was the first time during a game, a close game, in the last two years for me that I felt like the group had taken it over. It was actually out of my hands. That's what I'm looking for. That's what I want to see. That's what great leaders do; that's what great teams do. They take it upon themselves. They did it in four quarters. They held strong."

There's a break now for this team for November, and then they're back at it again, looking now toward London. There are three weddings on tap this month -- Mathewson, utility Lauren Wenger and team leader Jennifer Adams.

"All three of their weddings," Krikorian said, and he laughed, "might be that much more enjoyable."

U.S. women's water polo team wins out in China

One of the best, if most unheralded, stories in American sports notched another milestone Sunday. The U.S. women's water polo team, building toward London and the 2012 Games, won a major tune-up event called the FINA World Super League Final, defeating Italy in the championship game, 9-7. The tournament was staged in Tianjin, China.

The victory gives the U.S. team six World League Super Final championships and five straight FINA titles -- three Super Final victories, one world championship (Rome, 2009) and one World Cup.

Shortly after winning the final game, in a phone call from China, two players who over the last several years have seen much of the American program, said they were pleased, yes, but far from satisfied.

"I think we grew a lot as a team this week," Villa, arguably the mainstay of the U.S. team since the 2000 Sydney Olympics, said.

"Things are really going well," said Rulon, who played in the 2004 Athens Games. "But we are pretty far off from where I and the rest of the team want to be."

That's experience talking, and that's also buy-in -- buy-in to the program and mind-set of Adam Krikorian, the women's team's head coach since the spring of 2009.

It's easy to explain why.

One, the U.S. team has, over the past  decade, won everything except for Olympic gold. That is the goal, and everything along the way is a stepping stone.

Two, this edition of the U.S. team was brought together at the beginning of 2011; it is, in many regards, a brand-new team. Moreover, starting in January, Krikorian put them through a series of rigorous workouts. He said it would be hard. It was. But it also produced results -- undeniably better fitness.

As in any team sport, you win with defense. In Tianjin, the better fitness started to really show itself.

Over the course of the tournament, the U.S. team held opponents to about six goals per game.

"Obviously, winning the World League Super Final is nice," Krikorian said. "Every tournament -- you're playing to win. The more important thing is I look at how we were with our focus, and our focus this trip has been our defensive effort, and we were phenomenal.

"To hold teams to an average of six goals per game -- that is what we talked about what we wanted to accomplish. We did it defensively and we did it using everyone. The strength of this team is we are deep and we do it using everyone."

Next up for the U.S. team: the 2011 world championships, back in China, in Shanghai, in mid-July.

"Even though we won, there are still plenty of things we can better at," Krikorian said. "We will watch the video and they will be easy to find, believe me, and hopefully we will play better at the world championships."

A band of sisters on the road to making history

It's not that Lolo Silver wasn't already a world-class athlete and in what the rest of us mere mortals would consider great shape. Among her many accomplishments, she was the leading scorer for the winning U.S. women's water polo team last summer at the FINA World Cup, with 11 goals. Then again, the American women's head coach, Adam Krikorian, had promised the U.S. women that over the course of this winter, water polo's off-season, they would -- at his direction -- come to know what it was like to get in amazingly, ridiculously phenomenal shape.

Water polo demands ferocious mental will.  That mental edge is rooted in physical toughness. It's at once that simple and that complex.

The U.S. women's water polo team has won virtually everything it could win over the past decade -- with one exception, Olympic gold.

At the close of the 2010 season, the U.S. women were the No. 1 team in the world. To be atop the podium at the close of the 2012 London Olympics, however -- that is the manifest goal, and that's why Krikorian undertook at the start of 2011 a studied journey to take this team where it has never gone before.

It is, indeed, a journey. It can't be anything but. It's essentially a new team, a younger team and -- let there be no doubt -- Krikorian's team.

Which means it's of necessity going to be a long and winding journey. And a compelling study in both coach and team dynamic.

In sports, there can be no guarantee of anything. Beyond which, water polo is just too hard. If anyone in the American camp needs a vivid reminder of how hard, there is always Sydney and 2000 for a reminder -- one goal shy, just one very late goal, from gold.

That said: Krikorian, who came to the U.S. team from UCLA, is quietly but assuredly confident in himself and his means. The players have seemingly bought into his program.  Already, there is about this U.S. women's team a buzz, a feeling, a hard-to-describe sense that they are a band of sisters on the road to making history.

Perhaps the rest of the world doesn't know it yet.

But they do.

"Definitely," Lolo Silver said at practice this past Friday at their home base, a military base -- for real -- at Los Alamitos, Calif.

"We have all been pushed past anything -- pushed mentally and physically past anything we thought possible. Even the girls who have been to previous Olympics haven't had this sort of training this far away from the Olympics.  It has us focused and it has us getting together and it has forming friendships that are going to last forever."

At the outset, Krikorian made plain that despite the team's many past successes every spot on the roster was up for grabs.

No one was guaranteed a spot -- not even Brenda Villa, arguably the team's marquee player over the past three Olympic Games. She, like everyone else, would have to earn her way onto the 2012 Olympic team.

"Brenda has done a good job. She has gotten herself in probably the best fitness level she has been in, in a very long time," Krikorian said as he monitored the team, split into squads of three doing catch-and-shoot drills in the Los Alamitos pool.

"She has put herself in a pretty good position at this point. But," he emphasized, "there's no out here that's guaranteed a spot."

Of course, Villa was not among the women in the pool that day. She was nine time zones away, in Italy, playing for her club team, Orizzonte -- though Krikorian and the other Americans had just come back from playing against her, in an exhibition in Italy, but also with her, in another exhibition, against a team in Holland.

For extra fun this week in Los Alamitos, several of the women had started wearing 7 1/2-pound weight belts during their morning practices. Understand -- that is, in the pool. They were swimming or treading water or doing those shooting drills wearing those belts.

"Those are our new little gifts," Lolo said.  "To help us improve our leg strength."

Over the course of the winter, practice started at 7 and ran until 10, running again from 1:30 in the afternoon until 4:30, with a variation in the schedule on Wednesdays, to break things up.

There was time for both basic conditioning and for strength training.

Over the course of the winter, in a 200-yard swim test, Silver shaved 40 seconds off her average time.

At that level -- that is a huge drop.

She was hardly, however, alone.

Elsie Windes, who scored five goals during the 2010 FINA World Cup, is also 40 seconds faster now.

She said, "I did things I thought I couldn't -- things you thought you couldn't do but you did, and with your teammates."

Tanya Gandy, a standout at UCLA and who joined the U.S. national team in 2009, who scored five goals at the 2010 FINA World League Super Final, cut a full minute off her time.

"I still think the clock was lying," Tanya said. "It was good to see -- I didn't think I could get that fast. and I can get faster. It's very motivating to know how far you can come and how you can be pushed. Every day you can be pushed. It's testing you. It's testing your mental state."

"Maybe," Lolo Silver said with a shy smile, referring to Adam Krikorian, "there's a method to the madness."