Auriel Bill’s senior season in water polo in the U.S. might have come to an early end, but that doesn’t mean her collegiate sports career is finished.
Bill and her California State University East Bay Pioneers teammates saw the majority of their season cancelled due to concerns with the COVID-19 pandemic.
She believes it was in everyone’s best interests to have the season wrap up early, but it was hard for her, not only because it might mean the end of her collegiate career, but because the Pioneers were coming together as a team.
“We had a remarkable group of girls this season,” she told the Mercury. “We finally had a really good team chemistry – we were doing well in past seasons, but this season it just seemed like everyone was clicking, and things were really starting to come together for us, playing for a common goal.”
The NCAA has decided that those in spring sports, including water polo, will get an extra year of eligibility, since they didn’t get the chance to play the bulk of their season.
“We’re still waiting on the logistics of that, like scholarships and if you have to take a certain number of classes. There are still a lot of questions up in the air that the NCAA is trying to finalize.”
So it’s not a guarantee that Bill would get that extra year.
“I’m really hoping that I can pursue my education and play water polo for one more year,” she said. “I’m looking into some master’s options right now, and just seeing if something will work out that way. With that hope in mind, I’d like to think my water polo days aren’t quite over yet.”
The Pioneers are the only team she would play for.
“I honestly believe that if somebody would rather go to a different university, maybe, to pursue something else, I like to think they can go anywhere … but I know that if I were going to go for an extra year, I wouldn’t pay for anybody else,” she said.
The Pioneers were nearing the halfway point of their season. They had one big tournament remaining, and then they would have had the bulk of their conference games.
“Conference games are what determines your placement for the conference championship at the end of the season,” said Bill. “We had actually played two conference games, but we had a number of them that we still had to play in order to get ranking for the final tournament.”
Tournaments typically dot their schedule at the start of the season. They played a lot of the top eight teams in the country early on, which helped them prepare for the conference championships. The Pioneers goal was to be in the NCAA tournament at the end of the season.
If they would have kept playing at the level they showed in tournaments, she’s confident they would have won the conference title.
“The fact that it got taken away was really, really disappointing, but it gives the team for next year a lot of momentum moving forward. That’s going to be the team that goes and wins the conference championship and potentially makes it to the NCAA tournament for Division 1,” said Bill.
She was playing some of her best water polo, too, which is quite an accomplishment for an athlete who has won a number of awards during her four seasons with the Pioneers.
“The coaches were doing endless amounts of work just to prep for this season. Everything was really starting to work out, and we were working out the kinks early on in the season.”
Bill was a couple of assists shy of setting the program’s record for helpers, although she doesn’t know the exact number. It would have been a source of pride for her, because she views herself as a better playmaker than a scorer.
“Allowing other people to have success that way not only makes me successful and them successful, but the entire team successful.”
She was battling a nagging knee injury when the season was cancelled, so the early end to the campaign has allowed her to start rehabilitating it while trying to stay in shape. Classes have shifted online, and school is obviously a priority for her.
“They decided to keep it online until the end of the semester here. I don’t know what the new year will bring for school, whether they keep it online for a little while or not.”
Bill expects to return to Estevan in the next few days, which means two weeks of self-isolation mandated by the provincial government for those returning from other countries. School will remain her focus, because final exams are right around the corner.
