Scots’ Armour is water polo player of the year

Published May 18th, 2008

By Mario Sarmento
SPORTS EDITOR

Ali Armour is not your typical whole set.

At 5-foot-4 inches tall, she’s short, and seemingly too slight to handle the constant pounding at her position.

Yet this season, she was the hub around which the Saint Andrew’s girls water polo team revolved.

Armour led the Scots with 64 goals, and she made 18 steals to help her team to a 25-3 record and a berth in the state semifinals for the second year in a row.

That followed an offseason where Scots coach Adam Gaffey told his star he was actively looking to replace her.

“At the end of last year we had a long talk,” Gaffey said. “I told her you’re not big enough to play this position.”

Armour responded by traveling to Utah to train with the U.S. national team. She was one of the top 40 players before she was cut. That and her experience playing at the club level in California this year gave her the confidence to have her breakout season.

“Everything kind of clicked for me really fast this year,” Armour said. “I feel like I improved a lot really quickly.”

Gaffey saw something click for Armour as well, and after she started the year rotating at whole set with the taller Jillian Weigel, Gaffey left Armour at whole set full-time and moved Weigel to right side.

Armour doesn’t have the hardest shot, but Gaffey said it was the most accurate shot on the team.
“Her technique is very, very good and she can make adjustments really quickly,” Gaffey said. “She can always take the right shot. She developed a really good pump fake.”

Gaffey estimated that Armour scored on the Scots’ first possession 75 percent of the time this season, and the development of her shot was no accident.

Armour said she wasn’t very accurate when she first started playing water polo as a freshman, so she worked at it. She also lifted weights so she could better deal with the pounding at her position.

But perhaps the biggest advantage she has – and the reason why Armour is able to excel – is her adeptness at the mental aspect of the game.

“I worked a lot on using other people’s momentum to my advantage, and trying new tactics and new techniques that my teammates would show me or that my coaches would show me, and it really started to work,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to muscle them all the time, I was trying to tactically get around them.”

An example of that came in the semifinal match against eventual state champion Gulliver Prep.
“I would just go down on offense even when everybody was on defense, and I actually scored one goal that way,” Armour said. “They caught on to that and adjusted their defense.”

It was part of a frustrating 10-3 loss to Gulliver that ended the Scots’ season short of their goal of a state title, as Armour was double and even triple-teamed throughout the match.

Besides leading the team in goals, Armour was a respected team leader and co-captain this year, a far cry from her freshman year, when she was admittedly disinterested and joined the team to fulfill a class requirement.

“I joined because I needed a sports credit for school,” she said with a laugh.
“I missed the tryout for swimming, so I ended up not being able to do swimming that year. And water polo was the closest thing to swimming.”

Gaffey noticed her indifference, and he had another one-on-one chat with Armour that changed her focus.

“He took me in a room and told me that I need to get on track, and start coming to practice on time and more often, and just from there, I didn’t disobey him anymore,” Armour said.

Now, Armour loves the sport and the position she plays. She even plans on continuing next year at the club level at the University of Pennsylvania, which boasts one of the top programs in the country.
Armour, who has a 4.1 grade point average, is undecided on a major, but she said, “the more I think about it, the more I lean towards economics or business. My mom’s a stockbroker, so I obviously have that influence in my life.”

After four years, the girl who wasn’t interested in water polo whose coach wanted to replace her has made a big mark at the school.

“I was spoiled with her,” Gaffey said. “We didn’t have to do anything, just get her the ball.”