Girls’ Water Polo: Sailors hang on against San Marcos, 5-4

Senior goalkeeper Carlee Kapana smiles just thinking about the words that she sometimes hears from Newport Harbor High girls’ water polo Coach Bill Barnett.

“There’s this quote that he gives me before a super-intense game,” Kapana said. “He’s like, ‘Hey Kapana, if they don’t score, we win!’ It’s the coolest quote ever; he always just says that to me. That motivates me a lot, when he says that.”

Barnett, who will retire after this season, was hospitalized for Saturday’s CIF Southern Section Division 1 quarterfinal playoff game against Santa Barbara San Marcos following another hip surgery on Thursday. This time, Kapana said it was assistant coach Brian Melstrom who said the quote to her before the game.

At halftime, the Sailors were clinging to a one-goal lead. The visiting Royals didn’t score in the second half.

Neither did the Sailors, but true to Barnett’s words, the defensive effort was good enough to claim a 5-4 victory at Newport Harbor High and move on to the semifinals.

No. 3-seeded Newport Harbor (23-6) will play No. 2 Foothill in the first Division 1 semifinal Wednesday at 5 p.m. at Irvine’s Woollett Aquatics Center. Foothill defeated Mater Dei, 14-6, in another quarterfinal game Saturday.

Defending champion and top-seeded Laguna Beach plays No. 4 Corona del Mar in the second semifinal at 7 p.m.

Melstrom, Barnett’s successor, said that the Sailors are optimistic that the 72-year-old Barnett will be released from the hospital on Sunday or Monday and return to the pool deck early next week.

Watching the video from Saturday’s game — filmed as usual by his wife Marcia — Barnett will see a sterling defensive effort. Three times in the fourth quarter, San Marcos had power play chances to try to tie the score. Each time, the Channel League champion Royals (22-8) were turned away.

San Marcos Coach Chuckie Roth called his final timeout with 46 seconds left to set up a play. It seemed to work, as junior Hailey Gellert found sophomore Paige Hauschild cutting toward the left post. Hauschild’s shot went in, but the referees called an offensive foul away from the ball and it turned back over to Newport Harbor.

From there, the Sailors just had to play keepaway to earn their fourth straight Division 1 semifinals appearance.

“We were expecting [San Marcos] to come out really hard,” Kapana said. “The last time we played them [a 9-3 victory in the Irvine SoCal Championships third-place game], it was the fifth game of a tournament and they had just been creamed by Laguna. I feel like they were just excited to be in the third-place game, but this game they came out really hard. We were ready for it. We just need to put our shots away.”

That didn’t seem to be a problem in the first quarter, when Rachel Whitelegge, Ellie Reid and Kate Pipkin all scored and the Sailors opened up a 3-2 lead. Whitelegge and Isabelle Leveque scored in the second quarter, and the Sailors took a 5-4 halftime advantage.

But neither team could seem to get into a rhythm in the second half, each drawing several offensive fouls. The difference was Kapana, who had 12 saves, including two on San Marcos six-on-five chances in the fourth quarter. The Royals turned it over on the other chance by taking the ball inside two meters.

Of San Marcos’ four goals, two came on the power play and two were in two-on-one situations on the counterattack.

“Once again, she’s our savior,” Melstrom said of Kapana. “You know, it’s a team effort, she doesn’t want to take all the credit for that. But she makes blocks that most other varsity goalies will let one or two of those sneak in. She doesn’t. The goals they got were absolutely very high-percentage goals … anything that wasn’t high-percentage, we were able to survive.”

Whitelegge had two goals, two steals and an assist for the Sailors. Megan Bergthold led San Marcos with two goals, and senior goalie Jenna Phreaner made 11 saves. But the Sailors were able to keep scoreless Hauschild, the visitors’ top player. At times, she was guarded by Whitelegge, Leveque and Reid.

“We know that she’s a really fast swimmer and she could have countered us easily, so we were like switching it up and trying to keep a strong defender on her,” Whitelegge said. “She likes to turn in, so we wanted somebody who’s stronger at guarding set but still fast, and can work against her at the offensive end. That was the main thing, to make sure that we have most of her strengths covered, which I thought we did.”

Whitelegge knows she’ll also have her hands full in the semifinals guarding Foothill’s UC Irvine-bound senior center Cana Manzella. The Knights have had success against the Sailors this year, winning all three meetings. But Newport Harbor will try to take solace in the fact that it held Foothill scoreless in the second half of the teams’ most recent meeting, a 6-3 loss in the semifinals of the SoCal Championships on Feb. 7.

“There was a big difference in our offense and defense,” Whitelegge said. “In Santa Barbara, we played really flat [against Foothill in a tournament semifinal]. Come Irvine, we knew what we were doing, we just weren’t executing it all the way. I think that come Wednesday, we will finally be able to execute.”