SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — The UC Santa Barbara Women's Water Polo team will kick off the 2024 season by hosting their annual Winter Invitational on Saturday and Sunday, welcoming seven other teams to town for a total of 13 matches across two days. The Gauchos will be in action four times, taking on Azusa Pacific and Whittier on Saturday, then facing No. 3 UCLA and No. 25(T) Pomona-Pitzer on Sunday.
 
WHEN AND WHERE TO WATCH
The Gauchos will play in the weekend's curtain-raiser on Saturday morning, taking on Azusa Pacific at 8 a.m. UC Santa Barbara's second Saturday match, against Whittier, is scheduled to start at 2:15 p.m. On Sunday, the Gauchos will take on UCLA at 10:30, then play the final match of the weekend against Pomona-Pitzer at 2:30 p.m.
 
All matches on Saturday and Sunday will be played at Santa Barbara High School. Admission to every game of the tournament will be free and open to the public until the venue's capacity is reached. For those following from afar, live stats for every match will be available through ucsbgauchos.com and thefosh.net.
 
2023 RECAP
UC Santa Barbara's 2023 campaign was a statistically remarkable one, as the Gauchos scored 332 goals in their 29 games, the most in a season under Head Coach Serela Kay. Santa Barbara went 18-11 in those 29 games, finishing with the third-best winning percentage in program history, but the Gauchos bowed out in the first round of The Big West Championship against No. 3 seed Long Beach State. Two student-athletes received All-Big West honors: goalkeeper Madison Walker, who returns for her sophomore season in 2024, and utility Caitlyn Snyder, who finished her career as one of the Gauchos' greatest ever goal-scorers.
 
WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THE GAUCHOS
While UC Santa Barbara will be without last year's top scorer in Caitlyn Snyder, they have multiple returning players ready to step up and fill the gap. Leigh Lyter was named the team's Co-MVP alongside Snyder in 2022 and returns to captain the Gauchos in her fourth year on the squad. She has tallied over 40 goals and over 50 points in each of the last two seasons. Junior attacker Juju Amaral is also back, and with international experience under her belt, having helped Brazil take bronze at the Pan America Games in the fall.
 
Another Gaucho who played abroad in the offseason, Camilla Mackay, returns and will help anchor the defense in 2024. Mackay represented Australia at the World University Games last summer, bringing home a bronze medal of her own. She will be joined in defense by Drew Halvorson, the team's Defensive Specialist of the Year in 2023 returning for a fifth season in 2024. That defense will line up in front of a formidable goaltender union: Madison Walker, who made The Big West All-Freshman Team and was the Gauchos' Rookie of the Year in 2023, and Santa Barbara City College transfer Ava Donleavy, who was an all-conference first teamer for the State Champion Vaqueros as a freshman.
 
Santa Barbara also has a pair of freshman goalkeepers, Logan Tiska and Leilani Spies, among their nine-person class of newcomers. Attackers Isabel Valaika and Molly Souza round out the freshman class, with Kelsey Matthies (attacker, Arizona State), Jojo Scheer (utility, West Valley College), Christina Mullane (attacker, Hawai'i) and Natalia Stanard (center, Orange Coast College) joining Donleavy in the transfer class.
 
UC Santa Barbara was picked to finish sixth in a stacked Big West conference, and the Gauchos begin the season ranked 12^th in the College Water Polo Association polls.
 
SCOUTING THE OPPOSITION
Azusa Pacific comes into the weekend with a match already under their belts, as the Cougars defeated Cal State Monterey Bay, 16-6, in their season opener on Thursday. Montana White, a Division II All-American in 2023, led Azusa Pacific with a hat-trick plus two assists in the game, and Skylar Ford added five points of her own (two goals, three assists). Transfer Mica Schiavone, who won The Big West Championship with UC Irvine last year, scored her first two goals as a Cougar on Thursday as well. One other name to know is that of Madeline Schultz, an All-America First Team selection in 2023.
 
Whittier is set for their first season under new Head Coach Preslav Djippov, who took the reins of the Poets' men's and women's programs in August. He led Westcliff's men's team to the 2022 NAIA National Championship, but managed just one win from 27 matches with Whittier's men's squad in 2023. The Poets will play their first game of the season against Marist Saturday morning before facing the Gauchos that afternoon. They will be without their two-time All-American, Ally Burke, who fired home a team-high 48 goals last season.
 
UCLA reached the NCAA Semifinals in 2023, losing to eventual National Champions Stanford, and the No. 3 Bruins are primed to make another postseason run in 2024. UCLA returns three of their five All-America honorees from last season in attacker Emma Lineback and utilities Anna Pearson and Sienna Green. Pearson and Green were also All-MPSF Newcomers in 2023, as was attacker Taylor Smith. Lineback was named to the All-MPSF Second Team. Lineback (52 goals), Pearson (46) and Green (39) were the top three scorers for the Bruins last season. UCLA will take on No. 25 Marist and No. 10 UC San Diego on Saturday before facing the Gauchos on Sunday.
 
Pomona-Pitzer are the two-time defending Division III National Champions, and sit atop the Division III rankings. The Sagehens also begin 2024 tied for the No. 25 spot in the CWPA Top 25, rubbing shoulders with Division I teams like Marist, who they will face in their opening match before taking on the Gauchos. Pomona-Pitzer returns 2023 Tournament MVP and now senior captain Abigail Wiesenthal, who scored six of the Sagehens' 14 goals in last year's championship game.
 
COACH KAY MARKS A DECADE IN SANTA BARBARA
The 2024 season will be Head Coach Serela Kay's 10^th at the helm of the Gauchos. UC Santa Barbara's winningest and longest-tenured head coach, Kay has coached six student-athletes to a total of nine All-America honors. She became the program's first conference Coach of the Year honoree, when she led the Gauchos to their first-ever Big West Championship and NCAA Tournament appearance.
 
Kay will be joined on the pool deck by a pair of new assistant coaches in 2024, Emma Myall and former Gaucho Kenzi Snyder. Both coaches joined the staff in the fall of 2023, with Myall coming aboard as a full-time assistant coach and Snyder returning to her alma mater in a part-time role, primarily working with the Gauchos' goalkeepers.
 
UP NEXT
UC Santa Barbara will head out on their first road trip of the season next weekend, traveling to Riverside for California Baptist's Joust on January 27. There, they will take on No. 18(T) San Jose State at 9:30 a.m., then No. 25(T) Biola at 2:30 p.m.