Northeast Water Polo Conference Round-Up: Princeton’s Dustin Litvak

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Keller Maloney—one of a crop of promising freshmen for Princeton. Photo Courtesy: Nicole Maloney

Editor’s Note: Immediately following a 12-10 loss to the host Terriers at St. Francis Brooklyn College on October 3, Princeton Head Coach Dustin Litvak spoke with Swimming World’s Michael Randazzo about the challenge of playing in the Terriers’ den of deafness, the loss of center Sean Duncan, the impact of proposed rule interpretations being discussed by the NCAA Rules Committee and how different West Coast polo is from its Eastern cousin.

– To my knowledge there no place in the country like St. Francis Brooklyn—the small pool, the acoustics and the tenacious Terriers—for men’s water polo.

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It’s definitely a different environment. It was very difficult to prepare for this environment in one day. We had three really tough games [last] weekend, so we had to take Monday off and only had Tuesday [to prepare]. But there’s no excuse; we clearly weren’t ready to play today.

Yeah, it is an adjustment. [It’s] my first time here and we don’t have a lot of guys who have played many minutes in this pool before. They’re a very talented team, but we didn’t do ourselves any favors with 15 offensive fouls. And you’ve got to take care of the ball. We had a couple of costly turnovers and there’s no questions that this is a tough place to play.

– Eastern polo is a rough and tumble world of shallow-deep pools and fierce rivalries.

Every game in this conference is tough; every pool brings its unique perspective. I’m sure there are teams that don’t like to play in our pool, for whatever reason. It’s a great facility but the environment…

– It certainly doesn’t help you in games like this that Sean Duncan, your All-American center, is injured.

It’s unfortunate; Sean’s a great player [but] he’s been in one practice all year and that’s been it. We also were without Keller Maloney tonight—we’ve got a couple of guys with the flu but they’re playing through it. But it is what it is and its next guy up and we’ve got to be ready to go.

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Princeton freshman Billy Motherway. Photo Courtesy: Nicole Maloney

Much as we might try to form a narrow practice environment in our pool you can’t simulate this environment with the crowd. Again, it shows about how sloppy we were with the ball and how many offensive fouls we were called for that we clearly were just in a panic mode and let the physicality and environment get to us.

– This may be a setback but, in the end, there’s only one game that matters: the NWPC final. How do you see the Tigers progressing to this match?

We always talk about the process. For us it’s never about the result. There’s things we’ll take away from this game that we could have done better, but at the end of the day it’s not about the result. The result only matters in the last tournament.

There are several players that have been stepping up in Sean’s absence. We have some great freshmen; Keller [has] been one of our leading scorers this year. It really hurt us when he went out in the fourth quarter of the Harvard match [a 13-12 OT loss] and didn’t play in the rest of the game and the overtime. That’s a big piece of our offense, and otherwise Wyatt [Benson], Mitchell [Cooper], Billy [Motherway] and all of our freshmen.

Even the guys who don’t play a lot and are on our scout team, they’re huge to our process.

We always talk about the journey and this [game] is another step in that journey. I told the guys before the game: We’re going to look back on this experience win or lose and realize how important this was for us to play in a hostile environment with a great crowd rooting against us—and with a lot of things not going our way. I think it’s going to make us a better, battle-tested team.

Of course, it would be nice to come out of here with a victory, but at the end of the day it’s the experience that’s great for us.

– The fact that Princeton and St. Francis are now conference rivals—a result of the conference realignment three years ago—I think makes the Northeast Water Polo Conference the East’s best.

There’s some really talented teams in our conference. I think that GW [George Washington], Bucknell and Wagner are very strong and on any given day could beat any team in our conference. GW took Harvard to the brink at our Princeton Invite.

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Dustin Litvak. Photo Courtesy: Princeton Athletics

Both conferences are extremely tough and it’s gonna be tough for anyone to get out of our conference and then you have to play the winner of the [Mid-Atlantic Water Polo Conference] to get to NCAAs—that’s a grind.

It’s great that there’s so much parity and every game’s close. You can’t overlook anybody. That’s what makes the training so much more valuable. It’s hard to motivate the guys for training if they know they’re able to walk over a team, and that’s just not the case.

– There’s a lot of discussion, both in Europe and in the U.S., about the referees and changing the way the game is played. Coming from the West, you’re now seeing a whole new perspective; what are your thoughts about this process?

They’ve done a really good job addressing that there’s going to be an adjustment period. We’ve gone from a sport that is incredibly brutal to now where it’s almost not a contact sport. You see some games where there’s upwards of 35 – 40 exclusions.

Both for the officials and the coaches and players, it’s all about finding a balance. The game doesn’t need to be as heavy and physical as its been, but it also doesn’t have to be [that] every time you touch someone it’s an exclusion or an offensive foul.

Everybody’s trying to find out where that proper balance is. It was really awesome at our Princeton Invite that there were evaluators at every game. That’s one of the things I miss about the West Coast; pretty much every game there’s evaluators who watched the games and go over it with the officials afterwards.

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Senior Day for the Terriers proves too much for the Tigers. Photo Courtesy: M. Randazzo

I know that doesn’t always happen in the East; they were at our Invite which was great; most of our other games we haven’t had an evaluator—that’s such a crucial part of the process.

I also think the headphones, which were [available] every game at UCLA—that’s just so important. We have to utilize the technology that we have.

It hasn’t been implemented out here—I know that’s budgetary but hopefully that gets fixed because it’s really important.

The open dialogue is so important. The conference in Budapest; you just got back from Berlin; all of that’s so critical in opening up dialogue between the coaches and the officials because, in the end, we all have the same goal, and it’s to make the sport more fan-friendly, more appealing… and survive.

There’s going to be players and coaches confused, and referees one game calling one thing and another calling [something else] until we work out the kinks.

But we’ve got to give it a try. Otherwise, we’re just doing the same things over and over [while] expecting fans to show up. It hasn’t worked so far; why would it all of the sudden change?

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