CARMICHAEL, Calif. – Senior Gauri Mathrakott scored two goals while fellow senior LK Holliday led all players with five steals, but St. Francis ended up on the losing end of a 4-3 defensive battle in the varsity half of a girls' prep water polo doubleheader at Jesuit Pool Tuesday night.
The Troubadours' junior varsity also lost a low-scoring affair, falling by a 6-4 final to the Raiders. The SF varsity evens its 2022 season record at 7-7, while the JV moves to 9-8 overall.
Tuesday's game represented the home finale for St. Francis, which honored seniors Mathrakott, Holliday and Ava Stimson prior to the contest. Oddly, Jesuit Pool is closer geographically for the visiting team, as Rio Americano is literally located across the street from the Jesuit campus.
The Troubies and Raiders battled to a scoreless tie for the first quarter plus the first five minutes of the second quarter, when Jada Ashen landed the first of her four total goals with 2:23 remaining. Mathrakott then answered following the ensuing restart to equalize at 1-1. After holding off a 6-on-4 opportunity for Rio early in the third quarter, SF claimed a 2-1 lead on Mathrakott's second goal. This time, Ashen answered with her score in the final minute of the period.
The two teams remained locked up at 2-2 well into the fourth before Rio reclaimed the lead on a five-meter penalty shot midway through. Goalie Sophia Santsche-Chavez was called with an exclusion, then Miranda Ferguson with a five-meter, putting Ashen on the invisible stripe to shoot with Mathrakott as the effective goalkeeper. Ashen converted, then later stretched the lead to 4-2 on a goal with 2:56 left.
Junior Lydia Vlahos cut into the lead with under a minute to go with she collected a free throw from Mathrakott, walked up from the three spot, then fired high left into the net. That proved to be the last Troubadour threat: the Raiders drew an exclusion and called timeout with 37 seconds left. Another kickout made it a second 6-on-4 opportunity, However, rather than converting the power play, Rio chose to run out the clock, while the excluded Troubies ignored the wave-in signal from the desk. The Raiders effectively enjoyed 37 full seconds of advantage during which to kill the clock.
In the girls' opener, junior Havana Sperber accounted for the entirety of the Troubies' offense for the first 22 minutes of play, completing a hat trick in the first half to keep her team knotted up, 3-3. But Hannah Stuart scored two of Rio's three second-half goals, while St. Francis went scoreless until the 1:48 mark in the fourth, when Addison Hutchcraft buried her shot.
The SFHS junior varsity returns to action on Saturday for the second of two tournaments hosted by McClatchy, while the varsity is idle until traveling to Napa for the Julian Szmidt Memorial Tourney on October 21-22.
