As the season begins for the girls water polo team, they look to recover from a immense loss of talent last year. This talent was mainly Murielle Garbarino, now a starter on the Grand Valley women’s’ team who was a force for the Bucs’ last season. However, despite the losses, senior captain Sophie Kleyla sees potential in many of the new faces coming onto the team from middle school and elsewhere.

“This year our team is pretty small, and we don’t have a lot of people returning, but we have a lot of younger girls coming in that are pretty talented so that’s pretty exciting to see, it might be a little difficult because we’ve had about 2 weeks of practice, so we’ll see,” Kleyla said.

Grand Haven’s head coach, Jeff Ledger, was new to the team as of last year coming from East Grand Rapids.

“Jeff really cares about the program and he wants everyone to succeed,” Kleyla said.  “He puts a lot of time and effort into us. “

The team further refreshed its coaching staff this year under head coach Ledger.

“We have a new assistant coach this year, he was Grandville’s head coach for the past few years so I’m really excited to see what he can bring to the program, Grandville’s always been a really good team,” Kleyla said.  “From what I’ve seen he has a lot of experience and his drills are really beneficial, and he definitely knows what he’s talking about.”

Overall, Kleyla looks forward to building the team’s potential, as well as her own skill throughout the season.

“I’m hoping for us to have good team connection, and for us to all work together well, and play on each others’ strengths and weaknesses, obviously we don’t have a huge team this year, so just trying to figure out what we do best.  I’m hoping to improve as a player and really try and step it up for my team this year because we lost a few girls last year.  I’m really excited to see how the season goes.”