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Girls’ Water Polo: Orange Lutheran upsets Newport Harbor

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Bill Barnett has been coaching at Newport Harbor High for 49 years, longer than Orange Lutheran Coach Steve Carrera has been alive. Carrera, who’s 37, admires Barnett and the storied boys’ and girls’ water polo programs he built at Newport Harbor.

This season is Barnett’s final one in charge of the girls’ team at Newport Harbor. Carrera’s team traveled to Newport Beach to face Barnett’s Sailors in a nonleague match.

The game was already a big one, featuring the No. 3- and No. 5-ranked teams in the CIF Southern Section Division 1 poll. Knowing that the contest also marked Barnett’s last Saturday morning game at Newport Harbor meant something to Carrera.

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He had never beaten a Barnett-coached team. For seven years, while at the helm of Northwood, Carrera remembers the times his teams played the Sailors and they wound up on the other end of a lopsided score.

Carrera is in his third season at Orange Lutheran, and his team came close to knocking off Newport Harbor two days into the New Year. Carrera can now say he has prevailed against Barnett and the Sailors.

Carrera guided the Lancers to a 10-6 upset, closing out January with a key win late in the regular season. How huge was it? Carrera put it into perspective.

“The first year [of our program we beat] JSerra [in overtime of a Trinity League finale] to make the [CIF Southern Section Division 2] playoffs [as an at-large team two seasons ago],” Carrera said, but “this Newport game for sure [is the] biggest game of our [three-year varsity] history.

“I have the highest respect for Newport and Coach Barnett and [assistant coach Brian] Melstrom. They took it to us last time.”

The Lancers (21-3) returned the favor in the second meeting against Newport Harbor (13-5). They jumped to a 4-1 lead after the opening period, getting two goals from Kelsey Tyler, another by Bailey Dillard, and Newport Harbor provided the fourth goal.

One of the best goalies, Carlee Kapana, made a mistake with 1.5 seconds left in the first. After Orange Lutheran’s Myna Simmons launched a shot from near the middle of the pool with the clock winding down, Kapana made the easy stop, but with a couple of seconds left, she tried to get one last shot off. The problem was the UCLA-bound senior, while she cocked the ball back the ball crossed the goal line, and one referee saw it, ruling an own goal.

“[You] rarely see it,” Barnett said, “but she should know better. She knows she has to get out of the goal. She went back in the goal to stop the long shot. Instead of coming out and shooting, she shot right away. But that wasn’t the difference in the game.

“We were not ready for [Orange Lutheran]. We should’ve been. We talked about it the whole week. We knew it was a very important game. We did not play well. They outhustled us right from the start.”

What proved to be the difference was the Lancers’ defensive performance against the Sailors’ top three scorers, Rachel Whitelegge, Chanel Schilling and Kate Pipkin. They combined for seven goals against Orange Lutheran goalie Bailey Meyer in the quarterfinals of the Holiday Cup, where Newport Harbor held on for a 10-9 win.

In the second matchup, Meyer only allowed one of the three seniors to score. Pipkin produced a power-play goal with 49 seconds to go before halftime. Nevertheless, whenever the Sailors cut the deficit, Meyer, who finished with a dozen saves, saw her teammates answer right away. Sixteen seconds later, Tyler found Simmons near the left post and she beat Kapana to put the Lancers up, 7-5.

The seven goals marked the most any team has scored on Kapana in the first half this season. Not even the top two teams in Division 1, Laguna Beach and Foothill, who have each beaten the Sailors twice, have come close to recording that many first-half goals against Newport Harbor.

Kapana only gave up three goals in the first half in the previous meeting against Orange Lutheran. Tyler recorded three goals by herself by halftime, and Simmons added two goals in the fourth quarter, leaving her with three goals.

“Whenever you play Newport, that’s the first thing you think, ‘OK. How are we going to get the ball past this girl?’” Carrera said of Kapana, who made 10 saves, nine fewer than in the first go-around with Orange Lutheran. “All of a sudden, we started getting a couple of [goals] early and that made a big difference for us.”

The Lancers put away their chances, converting four of six extra-man advantages. They became the first team this season to break the double-digit goal barrier against the Sailors, who went into Saturday allowing 4.6 goals per game.

When the Lancers were on defense, they forced someone other than Schilling, who had five goals in the earlier meeting, Whitelegge and Pipkin to beat them. Tyler defended Chilling at two meters, and Campbell Ruh guarded Pipkin and Simmons took care of Whitelegge.

Lefty Ellie Reid led the Sailors with three goals, and that was by design. The senior had the Sailors’ lone goal in the second half, coming on a lob with 4:47 left to play.

With the result against the Sailors, Carrera said if Orange Lutheran wins its final two matches in the regular season at Santiago Canyon College, against Santa Margarita on Tuesday for a chance to win its first outright league title and against Long Beach Wilson in nonleague action on Feb. 10, his program deserves a No. 3 seed in the playoffs.

“We’ll see after next weekend,” said Barnett, referring to how the Sailors perform in the upcoming Irvine Southern California Championships might determine whether they move out of the No. 3 spot. “That tournament usually solves a lot of ranking problems.”

Carrera’s Lancers won’t be in the three-day, 32-team tournament, which runs from Feb. 5-7. Carrera said his team wasn’t invited.

“We knew going into the summer that we were going to be competitive, and we asked to get in that tournament,” Carrera said. “I know that there’s a routine and I know it’s tough to get into these [high-caliber tournaments]. I’m looking at it as a positive thing. I’m internally a positive person. I just look at it as going, ‘Hey, maybe this keeps us healthy, it keeps us injury-free, it doesn’t put a lot of wear and tear on us going into the playoffs because we know that [in] the playoffs every game is going to be super tough.’ This will give us an opportunity to sort of step back.”

Carrera was already doing a little of that at Newport Harbor, where Barnett became one of the godfathers of water polo.

Carrera had just coached against Barnett, who led the boys at Newport Harbor to 10 section titles during an 18-year period from 1967 through ‘84, before he took over the girls and led them to nine section finals appearances, winning five of them, since girls’ water polo became a CIF sport in 1998. Finally getting past Barnett was special for Carrera.

“We’ve never had a chance to beat Barnett really,” Carrera said. “But this was the last crack for us that we were going to have [against the Sailors]. I respect him so much. I’ve coached some of his girls [at Concordia University]. They are all such great players, really good fundamentally. He’s one of the greatest coaches in any sport. It’s not just like coaching against him, but like learning what he’s doing and trying to apply that to my team as well. I think if I can have just the fraction of the success he’s had, I think it would be a great career for me.”

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