All-District Water Polo: Ripon’s Scudder is Boys Water Polo Player of the Year

Zach Scudder sums up his philosophy on water polo rather succinctly.

“It doesn’t matter how many players you have sitting on the bench,” the Ripon High School senior said. “You can only have seven in the pool.”

Luckily for Ripon, one of those seven was Scudder, the 2014 Stanislaus District Player of the Year in boys water polo.

Scudder and the Indians had a roster of eight players – with two freshmen starting – during a season that nearly ended with a Sac-Joaquin Section Division II championship.

That lack of depth was immediately apparent in the section championship game against four-time defending champ Rio Americano (Sacramento). The Raiders’ bench nearly doubled the entire Ripon roster.

With the score tied 15-15 in the closing seconds, the Raiders scored the winner on a power play to bring home a fifth consecutive title.

Scudder, long and lean at 6-foot-4, 175 pounds, had four goals, an assist and three steals in the title game, but it wasn’t enough.

Or was it?

“Oh, it was 100 percent enough,” said Scudder, who led the Sac-Joaquin Section with 126 goals and 148 total points (goals and assists combined). “This season was more than I ever thought I’d do in my high school career. It was awesome.”

Ripon’s program is in its infancy, and that it reached the section final in its fifth year is an accomplishment in and of itself.

That the Indians were able to do it with just eight players?

“It’s crazy to think about,” Scudder said. “It seems like yesterday we were fifth-graders trying to learn the game, and now we’re seniors and we almost won the section championship.”

Scudder manned the hole-set position for the Indians, a foreign role to him. Usually, he’s a utility player and more of a driver. But the team found itself without a 2-meter man, and Scudder stepped up.

“He was an all-around player,” Ripon coach Erik Zador said. “He’s a good defensive player, he’s a good outside shooter, and he ran our plays for us. But about 75 percent of the time, he was our 2-meter.

“Because we only had eight players, we had to play things a certain way, and we had him all over the place.”

Scudder said the Indians’ key to success was making opponents adapt to their style of play.

“Ever since my freshman year, we’ve never had that big of a team,” Scudder said. “So we kind of got used to having to play our game and not the other team’s. We had to play our water polo.”

This story was originally published January 20, 2015 at 5:57 PM with the headline "All-District Water Polo: Ripon’s Scudder is Boys Water Polo Player of the Year."