Northwood girls water polo team, 4-1 so far, earns No. 9 CIF ranking

Northwood junior Hannah Miller is one of the team’s leading scorers.

After an early upset win over Tesoro, the Northwood girls water polo team (4-1 overall) is ranked No. 9 in this week’s CIF Division 4 rankings.

However, Coach Kyle Kim-E said the Timberwolves are without one of their strongest players, senior all-league returner Amanda Nguyen, due to an injury.

The Timberwolves have yet to play full strength as their only loss came to Irvine when three starters were out due to injuries, Kim-E said.

“Our team has had a lot of bad luck with injuries over the past few weeks.” the coach said. 

“As a coach, it’s tough to develop our offensive and defensive strategies without one to three starters each game and at practices, but all of our girls are doing a great job and are learning what it takes to persevere and be resilient.

“What is most exciting about this team is that we are starting four freshmen. We only have one senior in the starting line up, which means we have a very young and promising group of girls that are very talented.

“I’m hoping that our team is fully healthy in time for league and can showcase how strong of a team we can be in both league and CIF this year.”

The team’s scoring leaders are freshmen Mia Tomovic (19 goals) and Kaitlyn Kong (15 goals) and junior Hannah Miller (13 goals).

In addition, freshman goalie  Sanjana Venkatesh has 72 saves so far.

“Sanjana also recently made the USA WP Olympic Development Program Team for the 2004 level,” Kim-E said.