The Championship Division is the most competitive of the three brackets in which teams compete at the tournament. According to USA Water Polo, Session I ran July 18 through 21 in Orange County and included the 10U mixed, or coed, division.
The 10U coed roster, according to the club, is coached by Makayla Graham and Xavier Turla and includes Lucy Ferguson, Eric Hernandez-Lopez, Marc Liu, Bernadette Malysheva, Roberto (Tito) Mendoza, Sebastian Pan, Aaron Peng and Merritt Virjee. The 10U age group is open to players aged 10 and younger.
“We are incredibly proud of this team’s grit and growth on the national stage,” the coaching staff said in the club’s statement. “Finishing ninth in the country’s most competitive division is a testament to their hard work, teamwork, and passion for the sport.”
USA Water Polo describes the Junior Olympics as the largest age-group water polo tournament in the nation, drawing club teams from across the country. The event is organized into three divisions — Championship, Classic and Invitational — with teams qualifying for a division through regional tournaments held earlier in the year. The 2026 competition is being held across multiple sessions, with Session I contested in Orange County in July. Its final session is scheduled for July 30 through August 2 in North Texas.
The Rose Bowl Water Polo Club competes as the water polo program of the Rose Bowl Aquatics Center, one of Pasadena’s longstanding public aquatics facilities. According to the center, the Rose Bowl Water Polo Club fields competitive teams across age groups from 10U through 18U and takes part in major USA Water Polo events, including the National Junior Olympics.
The aquatics center itself has a long tie to competitive swimming and water polo in Pasadena. It opened in 1990 on the former site of the city’s Brookside Plunge, adjacent to the Rose Bowl Stadium, and has hosted national-level aquatics competitions over the decades. The venue is scheduled to stage the diving competition during the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, reinforcing Pasadena’s role as a host site for the upcoming Games.
The ninth-place finish adds to a season of competition for the Pasadena-based club’s youngest coed athletes at the sport’s largest national youth tournament.
Additional information about the Rose Bowl Water Polo Club is available at rosebowlpolo.com and rosebowlaquatics.org/water-polo. Information about the USA Water Polo Junior Olympics is available at usawaterpolo.org.
Details of the ninth-place finish, the roster and coaching assignments were provided by the Rose Bowl Water Polo Club and had not been independently verified through USA Water Polo results at the time of publication. The club statement was the sole source for those details, and no independent comment was obtained for this report.
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