Wednesday 29 April 2026
The King's Premier Water Polo team competed in the National Championships for the 20th consecutive time over the first week of the holidays. We were in a pool with St Peter’s College, Westlake Boys High School and St Bede’s College of Christchurch. Our first match saw us run up a record score of 29 – 2 over St Peter’s, and while this was an astonishing total it probably says more about the standard of the opposition than about our own play. Harry Rutherford (Year 13, School) was our top scorer on the day with five goals.
In the afternoon match we played South Island Champions St Bede’s and were expecting to win comfortably. However a string of defensive lapses meant that St Bede’s stayed in the game until late in the fourth quarter. We eventually took the match by 11 – 8 and were guaranteed a place in the top eight.
In order to qualify top of the pool we needed to beat Westlake, which is a task we had managed easily in the Auckland semi-finals. However with Max Norwell (Year 13, Greenbank) still struggling with a hip complaint and Zach Gleeson (Year 12, Averill) having had a two week break following a chest injury our attack was a little muted and we went down 9 – 6.
This left us facing Sacred Heart in the first crossover match and we shocked them early on by shooting out to a 2 goal lead in the first quarter, however their size and experience eventually wore us down. We managed to hold them until half time but the second half belonged almost entirely to Sacred and the final result was 15 – 7 in their favour.
On Saturday the tournament organisers decided to adjust the draw in order to finish the championship a day early and avoid any cyclone issues. This meant that our match with Hamilton Boys High School effectively became a quarter final. The match was a disappointing one for us as our shots consistently connected with either the goalposts or the Hamilton keeper and we ended up with a disappointing 8 – 6 loss to the eventual silver medallists.
Our final two matches of the day were in the 5th to 8th bracket where we managed a comfortable win over Rangitoto 9 – 7 and a very tight 10 – 9 win over St Kent’s in our final match of the season leaving us with a ranking of 5th place in the country. Well done to all our players for a fantastic Water Polo season and a huge thank you to all our supporters.