Daily Pilot High School Athlete of the Week: CdM’s Ueberroth showed the Will to win
Will Ueberroth had a decision to make prior to entering high school, namely which school he would attend.
Corona del Mar High was his neighborhood school, but Ueberroth also could have gone to Sage Hill School. His grandfather Peter Ueberroth, the former baseball commissioner who also helped bring the 1984 Summer Olympics to Los Angeles, was one of the founders of Sage Hill along with Will’s grandma Ginny. The gymnasium at Sage Hill is named after Peter and nicknamed “The Uebe.”
Will played basketball growing up, and he could have hooped it up in that gym. Instead, though, he was going in the direction of water polo by his eighth-grade year. He decided to attend CdM and play polo.
“I chose to play water polo here,” said Will Ueberroth, now a senior at CdM. “That’s really what I wanted to do. That was a big decision for me. My parents [Joe and Polly] let me make it for myself, which was really cool.”
Joe had to approve of his oldest son’s decision. After all, he helped found his high school water polo team at the Cate School in Carpenteria in the mid-1980s.
Four years later, CdM Coach Barry O’Dea is certainly happy to have Will around as a two-year varsity player. Without the Daily Pilot Athlete of the Week, CdM probably doesn’t win the Battle of the Bay game last Saturday at its home pool.
Will Ueberroth had two goals and seven steals as CdM rallied for an 8-6 overtime victory, claiming its third straight Battle of the Bay game. The two goals were huge, both coming in the final 61 seconds on the power play to tie the game.
In overtime, the Sea Kings got a penalty shot score from senior co-captain Will Rodosky and a counterattack goal from junior Mitchell Cooper. Overall, they blanked the Sailors for the final 7:44 of the game and scored the game’s final four goals.
“Once we got tied up, there was no way we were going to lose,” Will Ueberroth said. “You could just feel the energy.”
The season-high seven steals also stood out for Ueberroth, who led the Sea Kings (8-3) with 20 thefts through Wednesday. At 6-foot-3, he uses his size to his advantage defensively on the “one-two” (left) side of the pool.
“We always knew he was a pretty good defensive player, going back to last year, and he’s gotten better at it,” O’Dea said. “I mean, he’s a big kid, so he actually handles water and handles players fairly well. He’s not that easy to move around.”
O’Dea said Ueberroth led a defensive effort that allowed just one even-strength goal from the “one-two” side in the Battle of the Bay. In CdM’s 9-8 upset win over Mater Dei in the quarterfinals of the South Coast Tournament on Sept. 23, Ueberroth and Cooper did a nice job of limiting the Monarchs’ standout junior Jackson Seybold to one goal scored. Seybold, a Newport Beach resident, is Mater Dei’s leading scorer.
“Seybold just does a lot of movement stuff, and that’s one of the areas that Will has gotten better,” O’Dea said. “He’s getting better at moving on defense. He keeps his hips in a good position ... [CdM assistant coach] Kareem [Captan] has done an awesome job with these guys the entire off-season about really just fundamental movements on defense. And that’s one of the things that [Ueberroth] has progressed in, hugely. He showed it all summer, as well.”
So Ueberroth is excelling in the fundamentals for the Sea Kings in his first year starting as varsity. He has come up through the ranks, playing on frosh-soph as a freshman and junior varsity as a sophomore. Last year, he played on varsity but came off the bench.
Will wants to play water polo in college next year, and there are also more Ueberroths on the way. Will’s younger brother Matt is a sophomore in the CdM program who plays on JV. His youngest brother, J.P., is a seventh grader who is also playing water polo.
The family just loves the aquatic lifestyle. Will is an avid fisherman as well.
“That’s really what I like to do, just be in the water,” he said. “I love going down to Mexico to fish, like at the Sea of Cortez.”
The Sea Kings don’t cast their line into the CIF Southern Section Division 1 playoffs for another month. Right now, they are ranked No. 5 in the division. If the seeds hold up, they could have a chance to face top-ranked Harvard-Westlake in the championship match of the S&R Sport Water Polo tournament on Saturday at Irvine’s Woollett Aquatics Center.
O’Dea said before the season began that this year’s team was already as good as, if not better than, where the Sea Kings were at the end of last season, when they lost to Los Angeles Loyola on the road in the Division 1 quarterfinals.
He looks for continued improvement out of Ueberroth and others heading into what O’Dea called the “dog days” of the season. The Sea Kings have six games scheduled this week, including the tournament.
“It’s a pretty dynamic group,” he said. “They’re constantly getting better. We’re still not as good as we’re going to be, and we’re pretty happy about that. We are better than we have been at this point in the last few years, but we’re still improving. Guys are still emerging, and figuring out where they can step in.”
O’Dea knows that Ueberroth can step in and bury a shot. He showed the rival Sailors that ability two times in the Battle of the Bay game before a packed house, when it mattered the most.
The decision to attend CdM and play water polo? Ueberroth certainly wouldn’t go back and change it.
Will Ueberroth
Born: Dec. 27, 1998
Hometown: Corona del Mar
Height: 6-foot-3
Weight: 180 pounds
Sport: Water polo
Year: Senior
Coach: Barry O’Dea
Favorite food: Seafood
Favorite movie: “In the Heart of the Sea”
Favorite athletic moment: Helping CdM upset defending tournament champion Mater Dei, 9-8 in overtime, in the South Coast Tournament quarterfinals this year.
Week in review: Ueberroth had two goals and seven steals as the CdM boys’ water polo team rallied to beat Newport Harbor, 8-6 in overtime, in the Battle of the Bay game Oct. 1.
