<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
When the Millikan Rams host a Wild Card CIF girls’ water polo match today at 3pm, they’ll be facing a familiar opponent: Fountain Valley, the at-large entrant from the Sunset League, a team that defeated the Rams 9-4 when they played in the first days of January.<\/p>\n
“We outshot them 2-1 that day,” says Millikan coach Al Reyes, “but we just couldn’t find the back of the net.”<\/p>\n
Reyes said his team also did <\/span>a poor job defending Fountain Valley’s top two scorers (who had seven of their team’s nine goals), and converting their man-ups. <\/span>“You go 1-8 on your man-ups and you let their best scorers go free like that, you’re not going to win a lot of water polo games,” Reyes says.<\/p>\n Not coincidentally, the Rams’ focus for the last six weeks has been converting man-up opportunities (they were 4-6 against Poly in a loss last week) and improving defense. <\/span>If that work pays off in the Millikan pool this afternoon, the Rams could earn their way into the CIF bracket, to visit Dos Pueblos on Wednesday, a short turnaround Reyes wouldn’t mind. <\/span>“Who wouldn’t want to earn a chance to go to Santa Barbara?” he asks. <\/span>“Hopefully we can have a better showing this time.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A quick look at what Millikan needs to do to pull off a victory in the CIF Wild Card bracket as they host Fountain Valley, today at 3pm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"newspack_sponsor_sponsorship_scope":"","newspack_sponsor_native_byline_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_native_category_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_style":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_placement":"inherit","inline_featured_image":false,"newspack_ads_suppress_ads":false,"newspack_popups_has_disabled_popups":"","_":"","_author_alias":"","cap-aim":"","cap-description":"","cap-display_name":"","cap-first_name":"","cap-jabber":"","cap-last_name":"","cap-linked_account":"","cap-newspack_employer":"","cap-newspack_job_title":"","cap-newspack_phone_number":"","cap-newspack_role":"","cap-user_email":"","cap-user_login":"","cap-website":"","cap-yahooim":"","newspack_article_summary":"","newspack_email_html":"","newspack_email_type":"","newspack_featured_image_position":"","newspack_hide_page_title":"","newspack_hide_updated_date":false,"newspack_post_subtitle":"","newspack_show_share_buttons":"","newspack_sponsor_byline_prefix":"","newspack_sponsor_disclaimer_override":"","newspack_sponsor_flag_override":"","newspack_sponsor_only_direct":"","newspack_sponsor_url":"","newspack_article_summary_title":"Overview:","newspack_show_updated_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"newspack_spnsrs_tax":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-2123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2123"},{"taxonomy":"newspack_spnsrs_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newspack_spnsrs_tax?post=2123"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}