Golden Jets Senior Men Win Michigan State Tourney

The Golden Jets sent a senior men's team comprised completely of University of Toronto players to play in a college invitational at Michigan State this past weekend.

Coach Vlad Tasevski took 11 players to get another 4 games after their initial tournament a week earlier in Pennsylvania: Trevor Robinson, Luke Spooner, Alan Chung, Brook Ruffo, Tanner Regan, Paulo Ruiz, Julian Filice, Ian Weir, Michael Chapman, Milos Radojcic and Dan Pyette. With only 3 days of practice under their belts and missing several players, the UofT-filled roster lost all 4 of its games against Bucknell, Brown, St. Francis and Queen's. However, the team did get better with each game and also had to adjust to playing in a 30m pool with little to no conditioning.

However. this past weekend was far different as the squad went undefeated through its four contests to win the tournament.

The Jets/UT team opened with easy victories on Saturday over the University of Illinois
(13-4) and the University of Iowa (18-6). This was very important as all players got to play meaningful minutes spreading out the workload before the semi-final match also to be played on Saturday.

That meant three games in 8 hours.

The Jets/UT semi-final opponent was Notre Dame College.
The team played with discipline and ground out a 8-4 win to move on to the gold medal match on Sunday morning against the host Michigan State team.

The final proved to be a challenge for the Jets/UT men. The team fell behind early 0-2 but clawed back to win 5-3 and take home the championship title.

With the wins, the team evened its record at 4-4 for the season. Coach Tasevski was pleased with the team's performance noting that "they are improving".

Up next for the Jets/UT Blues in October is a trip to Chicago, the Ontario Water Polo Festival tournament in Toronto along with home and home games with McMaster and York. Hopefully freshman Marko Brasic, out with a shoulder injury suffered just before school started, will make his debut and help strengthen the squad.

New Junior Jets Debut in Rochester

The Junior Golden Jets with several new members, traveled to Rochester last weekend for the season opening tournament.

Coach Zoran Petrovic gave a broad invitation to players to attend the tournament and get the kinks out from the end of summer inactivity. In all, 17 players responded enthusiastically to attend: Nikola G., Clem, Clay, Benson, Marko D., Marko V., Pavle, Dima, Cosmin, Vule, Stephen, Alex H-M, Alex B., Ronnie, Ognjen, Roland and Boris.

Zoran rolled various 6-man rotations throughout the tournament to give all players playing time and let the players start to feel at home playing with all their new teammates.

While the field players got the rust out and had to adjust to new line combinations throughout the weekend, goalie Nikola played steadily and made several excellent saves.

In the first contest, the Junior Jets were in tough against a far more experienced and far bigger senior club team from Adirondack. The opposing center forward was 6'6" and 230 lbs! Nevertheless, the Junior Jets fought hard before succumbing 5-15. The second game on Saturday was against another experienced senior men's club from Rochester and the team surprised with a tight performance tying 9-9 throughout three quarters before succumbing at the end.

On Sunday, the Junior Jets had the two easier teams to play and easily outclassed the University of Rochester 15-5 and Binghamton University 15-10.

Zoran also chose to hold a one hour practice after the first game on each day so that the players could continue their systems work. All in all, a full weekend of games and practice PLUS a monstrous buffet dinner on Saturday night!!

The club wishes to thank Kent Chung and Ljupco Hadzi-Manov for volunteering as drivers for the weekend.

Up next for the Junior Jets will be a 14-team men's college tournament in Ohio...