Hawaii water polo has attained dynasty status in the Big West Conference.<\/p>\n
Top-seeded UH defeated second-seeded host Long Beach State, 14-9, for the program\u2019s third straight Big West tournament championship and a third straight NCAA Tournament appearance, both program firsts.<\/p>\n
Third-year sophomore Agatha Weston was named the Most Valuable Player of the championships at the Ken Lindgren Aquatics Center after throwing four shots into the net.<\/p>\n
Second-year head coach James Robinson was joined at the Big West\u2019s postgame interview tent by all seven of the Rainbow Wahine seniors, all of whom came into the program<\/a> close to when Robinson joined the staff of his predecessor Maureen Cole.<\/p>\n \u201cI feel like this is a really surreal moment. This group is really special,\u201d said four-year senior Roni Perlman, who tied her career high with five assists. \u201cWe all came in together, even with James, so we\u2019re all really close and we did it together, year by year, game by game, practice by practice, morning by morning, all of it.\u201d<\/p>\n It was the program\u2019s seventh conference tournament crown. UH was bolstered by a vocal contingent of green-clad fans.<\/p>\n UH, sporting a 16-5 record and ranked sixth, awaits its seeding into the nine-team NCAA bracket in the national selection show at 2 p.m. Monday on NCAA.com. The NCAA championships are set for April 24 to 26 in La Jolla, Calif.<\/p>\n LBSU (17-11) fell to UH in the tournament final at a third site in as many years.<\/p>\n The Wahine, who survived an 8-7 battle with fourth-seeded UC Irvine in Saturday’s semifinal, separated from the Beach in the second quarter, when Weston, Ema Vernoux, Tara Logan, Gabrielle Doyle and Ariadna Temprano Xambo scored. It was a three-goal game going to the fourth quarter and UH put away the match with four straight goals from Alia Burlock, Doyle, Xambo and Weston.<\/p>\n \u201cWe knew that game was going to be difficult,\u201d Robinson said. \u201cLong Beach is a great team, they\u2019ve had an incredible season. Every time we play them is a battle. Going into it the focus was on us; super proud of this group to be able to execute the details that we spoke about.”<\/p>\n UH has won 29 straight games against Big West competition \u2014 three seasons\u2019 worth \u2014 going back to 2024.<\/p>\n Brian McInnis<\/a>\u00a0covers the state\u2019s sports scene for Spectrum News Hawaii.\u00a0He can be reached at\u00a0brian.mcinnis@<\/a>charter.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hawaii water polo has attained dynasty status in the Big West Conference. Top-seeded UH defeated second-seeded host Long…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":264846,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[19375,6632,6631,19376,1815,2289,131,133,132,127,136],"class_list":{"0":"post-264845","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-long-beach","8":"tag-app-college-sports","9":"tag-app-sports","10":"tag-app-top-stories","11":"tag-brian-mcinnis","12":"tag-college","13":"tag-hawaii","14":"tag-long-beach","15":"tag-long-beach-headlines","16":"tag-long-beach-news","17":"tag-sports","18":"tag-top-stories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264845\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}