RAYLEEN HSU The passion Jessica Lopez exudes for water
polo erases any disadvantages her 5-foot-3 stature creates.
By Susana Zialcita
Daily Bruin Contributor
At first glance, Jessica Lopez doesn’t always intimidate
her water polo foes. After all, she’s 5 feet, three inches
and when she stands next to her teammates, who average around
5-foot-10, she looks a little small.
No doubt, the first impression is never the lasting impression
for Lopez. An integral part of the Bruins, the junior attacker led
the team her freshman year with 53 steals on the season.
“I’ll tell you what other people say when they see
her,” teammate Robin Beauregard said. “They see her as
this 5-nothing little person, and they don’t give her a
second thought. But Jessica can take them anywhere, she tools
anyone she guards and steals the ball three-fourths of the time
when she’s in the hole. Jessica plays three times her size in
the water.”
And Lopez doesn’t find that her size puts her at any
disadvantage. If at first coaches or teammates take her too
lightly, Lopez is patient and waits for due credit to come her
way.
“Some coaches may not have much faith in me at first, but
I manage to do my best and they see my qualities,” Lopez
said. “When my teammates first meet me, they don’t know
me, they don’t know my story, but once they get to know me,
they know I can take care of myself, and they also know when to
help me out.”
Head coach Adam Krikorian sees Lopez’s height, or the lack
thereof, as one of her greatest assets, and he should know.
Krikorian, who’s also not of towering height (he’s 5
feet, 9 1/2 inches), lettered four times for the UCLA men’s
team, played in two NCAA national championships, and captained the
team for two years.
“You can look at her height as a disadvantage,” he
said, “or you can see it the way Jessica sees it. She sees
herself as using her intelligence and quickness to beat her
opponents. She plays craftier and more intense than a lot of girls
twice her size.”
Lopez started playing water polo in Commerce, Calif.,
“when the ball was bigger than my head,” she said.
“Commerce has a great program,” Lopez added.
“It was funny, we’d show up to games, this team of
short, dark girls, and the other team would be like,
“˜What?’ Then we’d beat them.”
It would seem as if Lopez and her former teammates from Commerce
are challenging the notion of the “typical” tall,
blond-haired, blue-eyed, water polo player, but the fact is that
the norm just doesn’t exist.
“Water polo is definitely not a just what you call a
blue-collar sport,” Beauregard said. “Most of the top
players don’t come from that background. To say that all of
us are tall and blond is overstating the issue.”
In fact, almost all of the teams in the Mountain Pacific Sports
Federation have a 5-foot-3 player on the roster, and San Jose State
has a player as short as 5 feet.
It just goes to show that there is no such thing as the right
build for water polo.