Girls’ Water Polo Player of the Year: SHP’s Eleanor Facey

Which succinctly sums up Facey’s water polo game. One of the best 2-meter players in Northern California, Facey’s grit and determination helped lead the Gators back to the top of the CCS water polo mountain and earned her the Daily Journal’s Girls’ Water Polo Player of the Year.

“This year was definitely really great for me,” said Facey, a junior. “This year, it was (about) focusing on what can I do to help the team win … instead of how am I going to stand out in this game? Everyone on the team had that mindset this year, which allowed us to truly play as a team.”

What Facey could do to help the Gators win was to just do what she does — which is dominate in the set, the offensive position closest to the goal and the one that requires the most work and commitment to be successful.

Facey and the Gators were certainly successful. She led the team with 73 goals on 139 shots, which is a .525 shooting percentage. She was the focus of every opponent’s defense and when a player has that kind of gravity good things happen, like Facey drawing 76 exclusions on opposing defenses. Meaning, Facey was fouled hard enough to earn an ejection of the offending player. Three ejections in a match and that player is disqualified from the rest of the game.

“It’s tiring to continually run a drop on defense (to defend the set),” Facey said. “It gets really tiring for the defense. I’ve had to cover set and it’s not fun.”

But it was that determination by Facey and her teammates that helped the Gators regain the CCS championship — a title SHP held for 10 years straight before being knocked off in 2016, Facey’s freshman year.

The Facey family had moved to the Peninsula from Orange County as older sister Annabel Facey was entering high school. The Facey sisters had played water polo growing up and the Gators’ success in the pool was a big draw for the sisters.

“[Annabel] is the reason I started playing polo,” Eleanor Facey said. “We wanted to play at the highest level.”

Annabel Facey was a freshman when SHP won the 2016 CCS title and when Eleanor Facey joined the team the following year, it was just assumed the Gators would continue to tick off section championships.

Oops.

The Gators were upset in the 2017 finals by Leland and in 2018, SHP failed to make the finals for the first time since 2006, when the Gators were ousted in the semifinals.

Facey learned that titles aren’t just handed out.

“I had come onto the team (my freshman year) thinking we were the best team in CCS. That didn’t go as planned,” Facey said. “Having those two years (of not winning titles) helped the team, in general, to have a new mindset. That was a reality check that we have to work harder and harder.”

So there was a reason for the Gators’ urgency this season. That was never more apparent than in the CCS Open Division championship match when they took on Leland, the two-time defending Open champs and the team that had snapped SHP’s run in 2017. Facey scored only two times in a match the Gators would eventually win 17-7, but there was a sequence in the third period that showed just how much SHP wanted to win. She had already scored to open the third on a power move, but the next time down the pool the Gators fed Facey repeatedly. She missed on a couple of chances, but the Gators recovered the rebound and stayed on the attack. They kept feeding Facey and she kept shooting.

While she failed to convert, just the Gators’ doggedness had the Chargers on their heels.

“A great indicator of her perseverance is, there’ll be games the ball will enter (the set) over 20 times and she might have only two goals. But the fact the ball has entered means the position works,” Frank said. “In every game we plan we have, offensively, the goal is to try to have her touch the ball. If she’s not, the other team is doing a great job of taking her away.”

That may be the reason Facey loves the 2-meter position so much. She said it’s the one position in the pool that gives a player instant feedback.

“In my opinion, set is one of the positions where it’s really easy to measure your mistakes,” Facey said. “You’re not able to get the ball into set? That’s a measurable thing. Or you’re not drawing enough kick outs or turning it over every time it goes into you. Those are mistakes you can’t have.”

Facey admits that she gets off to slow starts offensively, but it’s not a lack of hustle or trying. The first few times down the pool, Facey is just trying to figure out how defenses are going to play against her. It may take a few possessions to adjust, but once she knows what the defense is doing — game on.

“It takes me a couple possessions to figure out what’s going on. I need that time to adjust to what the defense is doing,” Facey said. “I could go three possessions without a goal, but on that fourth one … .”