Water polo heads to San Diego for first competition


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Redshirt senior two-meter Ashworth Molthen scored 22 goals in his first season with the Trojans.  (Simon Park | Daily Trojan)

USC men’s water polo is back  and the team is going for an NCAA title this season. The Trojans are coming off of a successful 2021 season, finishing second in the NCAA tournament with an 18-3 record overall. 

USC has made it to the NCAA tournament for 17 consecutive years, and the 2021 season marked their 16th year competing in the championship match. Last season, the Trojans fell to UC Berkeley, a tough ending to an impressive season for Southern California. While the Golden Bears are looking for a back-to-back title this season, the Trojans are looking for something, too: redemption. 

Head coach Marko Pintaric, a former USC All-American believes the competition will be close this season.

“Competition is very level this year … Aside from the usual suspects — Cal, UCLA, Stanford — there are teams that are more evenly balanced, and it will be interesting to see how everybody will perform this season,” Pintaric said in an interview with the Daily Trojan. “You can’t relax against anybody.” 

Pintaric has been on the USC coaching staff for 21 years, and has an overall record of 23-15 as the head coach of the men’s team. In his first season as head coach in 2019, Pintaric led the Trojans to their 16th consecutive NCAA Tournament and a 15-6 record. 

In terms of roster changes this season, there has been quite a bit of turnaround.

“We have significantly changed our roster from last year in terms of who played in the NCAA final game. We will greatly miss our All-Americans Nic Porter, Hannes Daube and Jacob Mercep,” Pintaric said. 

However, new blood and strong leadership are two things that Pintaric believes will balance out this season’s roster. 

“This year, we have plenty of players who  stepped in. We have two returning seniors, Jake Ehrhardt and Ashworth Molthen, and a supporting staff of Marcus Longton, Chris Sturtevant [and] Carson Krantz, who really performed [well] during the summer,” Pintaric said. 

The team spent all summer training and playing against teams in Croatia and Spain. This trip marked a turning point for this group of players, not only skills-wise but in regards to team chemistry as well.

“I think that our time abroad this summer was really valuable to our team because not only did it expose us to a different style of play – which helps us be better adapted for whatever we might face this season – but it was also an incredible opportunity to get closer as a team, not just through water polo,” said senior driver Longton. He is starting his fourth season at USC as a top scorer, scoring 28 goals last season with a career high of five goals in one game against Pepperdine University. 

Alongside Longton is fifth-year Ehrhardt, a 2-meter who played for the National Team this summer. 

“I learned a lot this summer,” Ehrhardt said. “[I] got to play in my first world championship tournament, so that gave me a lot of experience and it taught me a lot of things about how to be a leader.” 

Ehrhardt scored five goals at the 2022 Fédération Internationale de Natation World Championships in Budapest. At USC last season, Ehrhardt was a top scorer, bringing in 35 goals over the course of a season. Ehrhardt has been an All-American for the past four years, and is ranked No. 26 in scoring, with 124 goals total in his career. 

The Trojans’ main competition this season is Cal, the final team USC could not beat last December at NCAAs.

“I know they’ve been working hard this entire offseason, so I’m assuming they’re going to be our toughest opponents,” Ehrhardt said. 

This season, both Longton and Ehrhardt have one main goal in mind: an NCAA championship. 

“We want to bring a ring to this generation of players,” Ehrhardt said. “We were able to do that in 2018, but since that championship, we haven’t been able to get a ring for this group of seniors right now, so it’s going to be really important.”

Longton agrees, saying that the “…overall attitude for this season is the same as any other season. Our goal is that national championship, and that never changes with this program.”

For their first competition of the season, the Trojans will head to San Diego to face Concordia University and UC Irvine on Sept. 3 at the 2022 Triton Invitational. USC returns home to face Long Beach State and Golden West Sept. 8.