By Ed Piper
A sportswriter approached Cole Atwell right after La Jolla's opening-round 10-6 win over Torrey Pines in the America's Finest City water polo tournament Fri., Sept. 21, expecting maybe a perfunctory comment.
Instead, Atwell, who had just scored six of the Vikings' 10 goals in the game, which his team led from the beginning, expressed his displeasure about the team's performance.
Asked his thoughts, the 5'11", 170-pound All-CIF player said, "It's frustrating. We have to come back from that."
Here was a top athlete, honed from early on by a coach father on his developing skills in the pool, looking through the four-goal victory to a team display he considered subpar.
He wasn't kidding, and he wasn't smiling. He wasn't discourteous--he just wasn't going to gloss over how he felt.
It's no secret to followers of the team last year and this early season that the Vikings depend on
Atwell's scoring for the bulk of their offensive production. In the recent annual Scott Roche Memorial Tournament in Menlo Park, in the Bay Area, Cole scored 28 goals in the four games La Jolla played over two days--the majority of the offense's production.
In a recent discussion about some of the secrecy coaches practice within the local water polo community, Viking coach Tom Atwell, the player's father, said one reason he doesn't post statistics on MaxPreps is, for example, so teams don't see the fact "Cole Atwell scores 60 percent of our goals" and adjust accordingly.
Of course, all the local rivals of the Vikings--Bishop's, Coronado, Cathedral Catholic and the like--already know this production is coming from this explosive scorer.
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