My senior year of high school was the best season of water polo I ever played. My team was good, and in the water we worked pretty well together, and the season was going pretty well so far. This was our first game against Bullard High (a good team in our league), and it was at their school. Their pool is all shallow (the deepest it gets is about 4.5 feet deep, if I remember correctly).

At any rate, the entire game it was close. We were both playing very intensely and the entire thing was very hard fought. I don't think that I subbed at all (I was a starter, and the trailer for my team). By the end of official time, we were tied, so after a few minute break, we went back for two overtimes. The rule in USWP is that if there is a tie, the teams go into two three-minute overtimes, swapping ends between the two quarters. We scored first, in the first overtime, but they quickly countered and scored. Nothing happened in the second overtime. So, the score remained tied. In the event of a tie after 2 extra "quarters," sudden death overtime is called. Basically this means that the captains go to the side of the pool where the ref is and decide which ends each team will have. There is three minutes played at a time, and the first team to score wins. This goes on until someone scores, playing 3 minutes with a 2 minute (I think) break.

We started our first sudden death overtime like all the quarters start, with a sprint. Rebekah (my teammate, a foreign exchange student from New Zealand) was the sprinter for our team, and she won the ball, as normal. She passed it back to me, and I looked at Bullard's goalie to see what was going on (it's a trick I learned, she's going to be watching the most dangerous player, so I know where to look as a start), and I realized that she had come out of her cage, to prepare for me to pass the ball over Rebekah's head for her to take a quick off the water shot. Her coach (who had been my coach for a season, over the summer) had told her to do this, because he said that we didn't have anyone who had enough of an arm to make a shot that early on, and from that far back in the pool. So, Carson had left the entire far side of the cage wide open, and I heard the fans and my teammates yelling to shoot the ball, so I did. Everything went silent. I had shot the ball from past half-tank, and it was making its way towards the cage. At that point, everything was in slo-mo for me. The ball was arcing, but I couldn't tell if it was going to go in or not. Apparently everyone else could . . . because all the parents and the rest of my team went nuts. Their goalie couldn't do a thing about it, she wasn't close enough to move to block it. The ball sailed into the net, and it was crazy. My team came and jumped on me, still in the water, and I was in shock. My high school was the underdog in that competition, and even the year before we didn't aspire to ever beat them, yet I had just won the game for my team! It was incredible :) After the game, their coach took a bit of ribbing for moving their goalie, since he had done it since "no one was able to make that shot" from my team, yet I had, and I was the only girl he had coached. It was great :)