Brown Men's Water Polo Win Over St. Francis Represents Changing of the Guard

After expending every bit of effort possible, with hopes of a three-peat dashed, Vuk Vujosevic of St. Francis Brooklyn lay slumped in a heap poolside, staring blankly ahead, eyes—including the bloodshot left one that had been poked by a Harvard player’s finger two weeks before—stinging with the bitter tears of defeat.

“I was really disappointed in that moment,” Vujosevic, a senior from Belgrade, Serbia, said earlier this week in reaction to the Terriers’ 10-7 loss to Brown in the semifinals of the 2014 Men’s Collegiate Water Polo Association Championship. “Emotionally I was completely empty. It was my last important game at St. Francis.”

“I gave my best, I know all the guys gave their best. [But] Brown was better.”

The result last Saturday afternoon at Lejune Hall at the U.S. Naval Academy not only signaled the close of Vujosevic’s storied career, it terminated the Terriers’ run for a third straight Eastern title. Instead it was the Bears who advanced to the CWPA championship match.

Saturday’s loss also marked the end of the Terriers’ remarkable success over its closest rival.

With two regular season wins over SFC and then one in the Eastern championships, Brown snapped a decade-long string of dominance by St. Francis . For the first time since 2004—excepting 2009, when they were banned from league play—the Terriers did not capture the CWPA’s Northern Division, a run of nine titles in ten season.

While Vujosevic and his teammates—five of whom are also seniors—contended with the bitter reality of defeat, Brown and its energetic coach, Felix Mercado, were experiencing the overwhelming joy of victory.

“To beat St. Francis, the only team I consider a real rival because they’re in the North, to beat them to get to the championship game, is an honor,” Mercado said immediately after the win over the Terriers.

“They didn’t make it very easy and I didn’t think they would. No question that game meant more because it was St. Francis.”

Not only did Brown’s win on Saturday put it in the title game for the first time since 1990, the following day the Bears would complete their ascension to the top of the East. By defeating favorite Princeton 7-6 for its first CWPA title since 1985, Brown earned a chance to compete in the NCAA Final Four for the first time in 24 years.

The Bears (27-6), seeded 5th, have a play-in match Saturday at 4:30 p.m. (PST) against 4th-seed UC San Diego (15-9), host for this year’s tournament. The winner of the Brown / UC San Diego match will face top-seed UCLA next Saturday.

But little of that mattered to Vujosevic this week as he cleared out his locker. The Terriers emotional leader was experiencing finality of a sort that he likely hadn’t contemplated: his time wearing SFC’s blue and red was over.

“I’m just beginning to realize how big a thing we did in my four years here,” Vujosevic said. “Maybe I’ll think about that 10 years [from now]”

Lazar Komadinic, the Terriers’ stellar utility player whose St. Francis career ended in Annapolis with a 14-13 overtime loss to Navy in the CWPA Championship’s third place game, struck a defiant note.

“It’s not that I expected to win, it’s just that I didn’t expect to lose [to Brown],” said Komadinic, who transferred to Brooklyn Heights two years ago from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

“Honestly every time we played them, we were tired. After Bucknell [an 8-7 SFC win in the CWPA tournament’s first day when the Terriers overcame a 5-1 deficit] we just couldn’t focus.”

A long off-season of uncertainty looms ahead for St. Francis, which will have to replace almost half its squad. In addition to Komadinic and Vujosevic, goalie Alex Gavric, utility player Andras Kovacs, co-captain David Lonnberg and defender Balint Toth all graduate this spring.

Terrier head coach Srdjan Mihaljevic acknowledged how significance the loss to Brown was for his team.

“As they say, it’s never easy to lose, but we are graduating 6 seniors and in that regard [the] finality of that loss was difficult, ” Mihaljevic said by email. “We came out short, but there’s no shame; for those 32 minutes we gave everything we had.”

“Despite [the] loss, our guys are still the winners on so many different levels, inside and outside of the pool.”

PHOTO CAPTIONS: St. Francis’ Vuk Vujosevic in action; Brown men’s water polo squad with their 2014 CWPW Championship hardware
PHOTO CREDIT: St. Francis Brooklyn Athletics; Brown University Athletics