Women's Water Polo can also handle balls pretty well

On the morning of January 26th, three Waterpolo girls teams arrived at Imperial from Nottingham, Norwich and Birmingham for a competitive weekend of games against three London-based teams. Our own captain Lil had organized for all the matches of our BUCS league to take place on January 26th and 27th at Ethos, and so we all had to get ready for playing five matches in two days. The Imperial ladies felt reasonably fit and reasonably confident of their ability – although we had quite a few less substitutes than most of our opponents (especially King’s, whose team consisted of about 15 players and 3 poolside supporters).

Imperial played their first match against University of East Anglia, which was fairly tight and ended in a 4-4 draw. After a 2-game rest Nottingham was easily defeated by 7-2. This great score made us all highly enthusiastic. So enthusiastic in fact that we all jumped into the pool while the match preceding our next game was still going on. Of course this was all our coach Adam’s fault, who had convinced us that the two teams were playing the fourth quarter of their match instead of the third. Fortunately this tiny mistake didn’t set us back too much, as we won from Aston 4-3 in a fairly tight match.

After a successful Saturday everyone was excited (and yes, a little bit scared) about the Sunday matches against King’s and UCL. With the muscles still tired from the three battles of the day before we didn’t manage to get enough goals past the King’s College goalie and the match resulted in a 4-3 loss. Four other games separated us from our final match that was to determine whether or not we would go through to the semifinals. The spirits were lifted and we started off energetically, but unfortunately UCL were too strong for us and they beat us 5-3.

This means that for us this year’s BUCS ended after the weekend of the 26th and 27th. We played as well as we could and the results were betterthan some of us had expected beforehand, so that still makes this result a success!

The King’s College ladies came in first in our league, and therefore they will be promoted to the first division for next year. With UCL coming second, these two teams will be competing in the semifinals.