Team USA Women Move on to Semifinal in Water Polo

(Photo: Jeff Cable, Jeff Cable’s Photography Blog)

As the USA Women’s Water Polo Team began their quarterfinal game against Team Canada Tuesday afternoon, I couldn’t help thinking how fitting it was that I should see a women’s team bout between USA and Canada. I was in PyeongChang in 2018 when the USA Women won gold against their ever-present rivals, Canada, in ice hockey.

Though the animosity certainly wasn’t the same between the two teams during Tuesday’s quarterfinal game, it was still clear that Team USA was intent on winning and moving forward in the tournament. For the women of Canada, the Tokyo games was their first chance to represent their country in water polo since 2004.

Team USA came out fast and hard, putting up five goals in the first half of the opening quarter. It was a cornucopia of ways in which a team can make a goal in water polo: penalty shot, counter attack shot, centre shot, extra player shot and a shot in a driving situation. As soon as Canada had possession of the ball after that fifth goal was scored by Team USA, their coach, David Paradelo, signaled for a time out.

Canada got on the scoreboard right after the time out and would continue putting balls on the net and on USA’s goalkeeper Ashleigh Johnson, throughout the first three quarters. At the start of the fourth quarter, the Americans had a commanding 11-3 lead, though all the goals for both teams had been scored in the first two quarters. Johnson was swapped out with Amanda Longan going in for USA.

Not surprising, coming in cold, the first couple of opportunities for Canada got past Longan, but she then denied the next three shots she faced, and when the game was over the final score was 16-5. Team USA would continue on to the semifinal and Canada would play in a classification game.

For the Americans, there are some on the team who have been here before, having competed  in Rio in 2016. Their captain, Maggie Steffens also competed in London in 2012 and understands that you need to focus on the game at hand never looking ahead.

“This is what you train for. Bracket play is kind of tournament one and tournament two is do or die in a sense. That’s what you’re training for. All of those years, all of those hours in the pool when you think you couldn’t go any further and you kept going, this is that part of the tournament where you’re able to kind of take all of your preparation and just let go and have fun. At the end of the day, you don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know who’s going to win. We don’t if we’re going to play well or play badly. But what we do know is that we can give our best effort, we can give our best focus, we can give the best game we can and hopefully that means we win, but we also don’t know that,” said Stefffens after their win over Canada.

Team USA will face the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC), winner of their quarterfinal game against Australia. The semifinal game will take place Thursday, August 5th, at 3:30pm JST.

Note: If you love the photo, be sure to check out more by visiting Jeff Cable’s Photography Blog here.