By Ali Rodriguez
Already a dream season for three local provincial and national champions, Euan Scoffield, Dusan Boskovic and Yorek Hurrelmann continued to rake in the accolades in July, earning a bronze medal with Team Canada at the Junior Pan American Water Polo Championships in California.
“I feel proud to have been on the team,” Scoffield says by e-mail from Istanbul, where his journey is set to get even better as he prepares to play at his first FINA Youth World Championships.
Scoffield had a pair of familiar faces with him for the junior event in Ottawa Titans teammates Boskovic and Hurrelmann, and the same will be true for the youth worlds with fellow Titans Colin Colterjohn and Aleksa Gardijan. The rest of the Canadian side hails from all corners of the country.
“Our team only had three weeks to train together for (the Pan Am) tournament,” highlights Scoffield. “For a group of athletes who don’t usually play with each other throughout, this was a challenge. Coming third was really an accomplishment.”
Having played up an age group with the Canadian junior team, the 18-year-old was still eligible to join the younger national team for the Aug. 2-10 event in Turkey.
“Worlds is going to be a much bigger tournament than Pan Ams,” Scoffield underlines. “Every game is going to be harder than the last and there will be no time to relax in this tournament.”
It’s been quite the experience already traveling to Eastern Europe, the world’s water polo hotbed.
“While I was in Budapest, I got to see how in countries like Hungary, water polo is to them like hockey is to Canada,” Scoffield recounts. “Kids would come up to us and ask for pictures because to them we are a big deal.”
There were a number of other local water polo players who took big steps forward in their pursuit of future national team opportunities.
An impressive stable of 10 Capital Wave Water Polo Club players – Floranne Carroll, Jewelle Crocker, Madeline Hemstreet, Case Langevin, Megan MacCormac, Emma McGinnis, Valeria Rojas, Jillian Stringer, Katie Allerton and Adele Scarlett – along with the Titans’ Lotte Hurrelmann competed for Ontario in Water Polo Canada’s 2014 Youth Cup July 12-20 in Montreal.
Competing on the boys’ side of the Youth Cup were Capital Wave’s Sean Legg and Aidan Kronberg, and the Titans’ Dmitry Prokoptsov, Raphael Siegel and Laurent Brosseau.
Rodrigo and Veronica Rojas were part of the Ontario coaching staffs at the event, while their father, Capital Wave club head coach Celso Rojas was an assistant for the Canadian women’s team that also won bronze at the Pan Am Championships.