U.S. women win water polo gold

KAZAN, Russia — Rachel Fattal bubbled up with absolute, incandescent delight in describing late Friday how it felt to win the women’s water polo world championship. “Surreal,” she said. Then, a moment later, “Amazing.” Then, finally, “Unbelievable amounts of joy and happiness.”

The U.S. women, led all tournament by Fattal, part of a new generation of world-class talent on the team, held on Friday night to defeat the Netherlands, 5-4, before a raucous crowd.

With the victory, the American women won their fourth world championship; no other women’s program has as many.

Further, heading now toward the Rio 2016 Olympics, the U.S. women are — all at the same time — Olympic, world championship, World Cup and World League champions.

“The media likes it. USA Water Polo likes it,” U.S. head coach Adam Krikorian said, referring to that string.

“But every team is unique. Every championship is special.”

You can talk all you want about how tough any sport on the Olympic program is. There’s no doubt the toughest is water polo. The skill set it takes to play the game at a world-class level is formidable, and that’s being generous.

The game demands that you swim, tread water and wrestle with your opponents, all the while trying to shoot the ball into a net or stopping the other team from doing the same. Try it. See if you last even one minute before you end up flopping by the side of the pool.

The U.S. women finished sixth at the world championships in 2011 in Shanghai, losing to Russia in a stunner; they got fifth at the Barcelona 2013 worlds, losing to Spain.

In between, the U.S. women took gold at the 2012 London Games.

Since London and in particular Barcelona, the team has undergone some significant changes.

Heather Petri and Brenda Villa, for instance, mainstays on the U.S. team for more than a dozen years, retired.

So, too, Betsey Armstrong, the starting goalie for years. The backup goalie, Tumua Anae — retired as well.

It is a testament to the athletes in the pipeline — as well as the skill and verve of Krikorian, his assistant coaches and staff — that the U.S. women have been able to, well, plug and play and stay not just near but at the top of the world.

It’s not just that the senior U.S. women are now world champions.

The U.S. girls’ junior and youth teams — they’re No. 1 in the world, too.

Starting goalie Ashleigh Johnson is a rising senior at — of all places — Princeton. She was named the Kazan 2015 tournament’s best goalie.

With about 4 minutes to go in Friday’s final quarter, she made a highlight reel-worthy save on a penalty shot, obviously from point blank range, delivered by Holland’s Catharina Van Der Sloot.

She made another with 16 seconds to go in the game, this time off a shot from Nomi Stomphorst, that sealed the deal for the Americans.

“I didn’t feel very much pressure,” she said when asked about taking over in goal for a mainstay such as Armstrong, adding a moment later that she and the other new U.S. goalie, Sami Hall, were able to step right in: “I feel like this is a new team.”

Which in so many ways it is.

Kami Craig, Courtney Mathewson, Maggie Steffens — they’re still key elements of the U.S. effort.

But:

Maddie Musselman, who just turned 17 in June, is going to be a senior in high school; she scored Friday night to put the U.S. ahead, 2-1, in the second period. Her dad, Jeff, pitched for five years in the major leagues, for Toronto and the New York Mets, from 1986 through 1990.

Makenzie Fisher, 18, just finished high school. Her dad, Erich, was on the U.S. men’s team that took fourth at the 1992 Barcelona Games.

Fattal is due to be a senior this fall at UCLA. She scored once Friday, cementing her status as the tourney MVP.

The set-up for the match Friday night under the lights — game time was 10 p.m. — evoked memories for not just a few observers of the women’s water polo final at the 2008 Beijing Games.

That match featured a higher-ranked U.S. team against an up-and-coming Dutch squad; the Dutch ended up winning, 9-8, on a goal with 26 seconds left from left-hander Danielle de Bruijn; she scored an astonishing seven goals.

The game Friday was notable for its defensive intensity.

Steffens, the U.S. captain, said after the game she could only hear out of her right ear; the left one got dinged, and hard.

When the game was over, two water polo caps, the special headgear that all players wear, lay at the bottom of the pool — they had been ripped off during the game.

The only two-goal lead of the game came late, the Americans up, 5-3, on Mathewson’s shot with 35 seconds to go in the third.

It stayed 5-3 until Holland’s Maud Megens scored with 3:13 to go. 5-4.

Back and forth it went, tension building, until the final save, with those 16 seconds left, by Johnson.

When the final buzzer sounded, all the American players jumped in the pool, dragging Krikorian — in a blue USA Water Polo and khaki pants — and his assistants in, too.

“I’m just happy we eeked that out,” he said. “The Dutch — they played really tough.”

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."