"They were big, fast, blonde and tan."

And they scored often.

That was Harvard women's water polo Tri-Captain Kathy Kitayama's assessment of the competition from the West Coast at the national tournament held last weekend at Brown.

Three California teams outscored Harvard by a combined score of 64-11 to send the Crimson home without the national championship trophy, won by San Diego State.

But Harvard Coach Chris Hafferty said he wasn't one bit disappointed with the Crimson's sixth-place finish, the second-best showing by an Eastern squad.

"We've been trying to get to nationals for the past couple of years and we were pleased to even go," Hafferty said. "The team talent and scoring was less this year than past years, but I have to give a lot of credit to the team to get so far with less talented players.

"They stayed focused with the same goals as past teams, but they showed a lot more effort," Hafferty continued. I think they did the best they possibly could have this season. I'm very proud of them."

The fifth-seeded Crimson opened up the weekend against fourth-ranked UC-Santa Barbara and top-seeded San Diego State. None of the squad members or Hafferty knew anything about the Golden State squads before Friday's games, but the Crimson tried to keep calm against the higher-ranked Western schools.

But when the splashing subsided on Friday afternoon, Santa Barbara was on top, 23-3, and some were considering sending a diving team to scrape the Crimson off the bottom of the pool. Liz Brummond chalked up Harvard's first goal of the game in the third quarter when Santa Barbara had already scored three touchdowns. Tri-Captain Gillian Salton and freshman Skyler Satenstein rounded out the Crimson's field goal for the game with a goal apiece in the final quarter.

Harvard was without one of its goalies, Mel Berger, who was still suffering from a virus. Adding injury to injury, goalie Karen Flick rebroke a finger in the first half. Harvard's third goalie, Kelly McAnaney, was heavily taped up as well.

"Chris said it was the worst game we played all season," Kitayama said. "We had tunnel vision on defense and didn't help each other out. On offense we were making bad passes to the hole and we were throwing it away up top, too. We decided to just look forward to our hard games and correct all the mistakes that we made."

Survival is usually what's on a team's mind when it faces the top-ranked team in the country, and correcting mistakes is usually an afterthought. But the Crimson stuck to its game plan of setting up a double hole on offense, passing more accurately, working together on defense and containing San Diego's lethal fast break.

But that wasn't nearly enough to hold off the eventual national champions, who cruised by the Crimson, 26-4, on Friday night. Harvard held San Diego close in the first quarter and trailed by only a 6-2 margin at the first intermission.

But San Diego slowly pulled away, shutting down the Crimson's offense until the fourth quarter when the score was 21-2. After two straight drubbings, the squad was grumbling about the football-type scores. But Hafferty had a different view of the situation.

"San Diego didn't score a single fast- break goal all game," he said. "Sure, the scorewas lopsided, but so was the talent. They're thetournament champions. We executed very well and Iwas proud of how they shut down that part of theiroffense."