Segerstrom boys water polo team stuns No. 2 seed Northwood 12-8 and advances to semifinals of CIF playoffs

Senior Jose Barajas led Segerstrom with four goals in Saturday’s victory (Tim Burt photo)

Segerstrom’s boys water polo team pulled off a major upset Saturday morning, defeating No. 2 seeded Northwood 12-8 in the quarterfinals of the CIF Division 3 playoffs before its home fans.

The victory lifts the Jaguars (26-5) into the semifinals Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. against Servite at the Woollett Aquatics Complex in Irvine. Servite defeated San Marcos 16-7 on Saturday.

Segerstrom won CIF titles in 2013 and 2015 and this year’s squad has had quite a season, winning the Golden West League title.

Segerstrom outscored Northwood 4-1 in the second quarter to take a 6-4 lead and later extended the margin to 8-4.

“We did a lot of homework on this team,” said Segerstrom Coach Michael Varela. “We luckily had a scrimmage against them earlier in the season that was kind of like our opening scrimmage and we played a lot in the summer with them so we knew they were a resilient counter team and we knew they have a lot of speed and consistency so we had to bring that same  thing to match that.

“We’ve been working on that all year long and we had to get that defense on point to match a team with that much power.”

Segerstrom also got a boost from its home fans.

“The boys were 16-0 at home, so that meant everything to them,” Varela said.

Senior Jose Barajas, the team’s leading scorer, led Segerstrom (25-5) with four goals. Dominic Hernandez, Daniel Covarrubius and Samuel Gregorio had two goals each for the Jaguars. Varela was also pleased with the play of goalkeeper Andres Franco, who had some key saves. He has only been playing the position for a year and a half.

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“Jose is an outstanding athlete. He won CIF (title) his freshman year with the winning goal and he’s an outstanding young man and he’s just a competitor,” Varela said.

“We knew that they were a good team and we play had to play good defense,” Barajas added.

Now, he and his teammates will focus on the semifinals.

“We have to play as a team,” he said. “We can’t get satisfied with what we’ve accomplished, we just need to keep pushing to get to that finals game.”

Northwood led 3-2 after one quarter on goals by Max Abravanel, Spencer Sellwood and Cameron An, but Segerstrom shut the Timberwolves down in the second quarter.

Abravanel and Sellwood led Northwood (23-8) with three goals each.

“It’s a very disappointing game,” said Northwood Coach Kyle Kim-E. “I thought that we came mentally prepared for the game. And then as soon as the game started, we were over-thinking a lot of things. We’re used to playing a lot more loose, but Segerstrom is a very good team and they have a very good two-meter player in Jose, so we knew we had to at least do our best to not let him have the ball and unfortunately he got the ball way too much and he capitalized on it.

“They’re well coached and I hope they do well. The first quarter, I thought we were doing pretty well on the counter-attack and they started switching some things up. We tried to make adjustments as well and unfortunately we didn’t execute as well as we could have.”

Kim-E met with his players, who were hoping to land a spot in the CIF finals and pointed out their accomplishments.

“Every year everyone tells us Northwood is going to have an off year and we’ve gone from D4 semifinalist to D3 second round and now D3  quarterfinals,” Kim-E said. “It’s been a long uphill battle, but next year, we still return a good nucleus of guys and we should hopefully still be as competitive as we can be.”

-Tim Burt, OC Sports Zone; timburt@ocsportszone.com