Fabio De Marco scored five goals to help lead the Vikings men’s water polo team to a 19-18 victory over Canada’s U19 national team.
​“Playing against a national team like Canada was a valuable experience. They faced challenges early on, but their ability to adjust and capitalize on mistakes shows their resilience, which is encouraging for our team’s progress,” LBCC assistant coach Michael Carrillo said when asked about competing against Team Canada.
​“I felt like we played a pretty good game. Our defense was good in the beginning, but our conditioning needs to step up, so that means swimming more in practice and just playing harder,” Vikings attacker Elijah Webb, who scored two goals, said.
Canada coach Cyril ​Dorgigne said he was proud of how his team competed against LBCC, but acknowledged that their mistakes proved costly.
“Yeah, we will be super hard, and when we are behind by two goals, we will stay in the game and make a comeback to win, and the team will be happy,” Dorgigne said when asked about his
“The game was good because this is the second time that the team is playing together, but definitely we are still making a couple of easy mistakes that we should be able to improve on and a couple of goals that we gave away because of our positioning mistakes. But that is going to be a main focus for the next couple of days,” Dorgigne said.
Both teams scored three goals in the fourth quarter, leaving the game tied and sending it into overtime. ​
​​After the game, Carrillo expressed optimism about future growth and hope for the team’s development.
“There is always something to improve on, especially our defense, which can help us secure wins in regulation,” Carrillo said.
​Carrillo said LBCC’s ability to compete with Team Canada was encouraging for the program.
“I think that something very exciting because [it is] assuring that this level of competition that we have here in LBC, it’s been years of the program doing well and hoping to continue, and also having a team like Canada come out and compete with them is great,” Carrillo said.
​​Webb scored two goals in the game that helped LBCC win against Canada.
“It felt pretty good, and I felt like our team stepped up together at the end of the game, and we were able to get the job done against a team like Canada,” Webb said.
Despite scoring twice, Webb said he still saw areas of his game he wanted to improve.
“I’m going to try to be more aggressive and also look for more opportunities to be able to shoot the ball, but also just to have more of an opportunity to spread the ball around and get more people to score goals,” Webb said.
Webb said competing against a national team could help draw more attention to LBCC men’s water polo and encourage more people to attend games.
“I would say the water polo is a very fun and exciting but also fast-paced sport. Also, there are a lot of goals, so if you like action, there’s a lot, but yeah, overall it’s fun to watch,” Webb said.
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