Tokyo Olympics on Longan’s mind

After pandemic eases, USC and Oaks Christian grad seeks spot on final roster




SAVED BY THE BELL— Amanda Longan, 23, is a goalkeeper for the U.S. women’s water polo team. The Oaks Christian High grad grew up in Moorpark and helped USC win two NCAA championships.

SAVED BY THE BELL— Amanda Longan, 23, is a goalkeeper for the U.S. women’s water polo team. The Oaks Christian High grad grew up in Moorpark and helped USC win two NCAA championships.

Amanda Longan was a month and a half away from knowing if she would make the final cut for Team USA.

Those six weeks have stretched into a year.

Longan, a goalkeeper on the women’s senior national team for USA Water Polo, was one of three goalies on a 17-player squad— but only 13 athletes expected to represent the Stars and Stripes at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

That was the plan, at least.

The International Olympic Committee postponed the summer games, which were set to begin July 24, due to the coronavirus. This marks the first time the IOC has postponed the Games; the Olympics were canceled during the first and second World Wars.

Longan, 23, said the additional year off will allow Team USA to improve its chemistry. The 2019 USC graduate and former Oaks Christian High standout said the year will also give her time to focus on her personal goals.

“I’m still trying to earn more and more playing time to work my way toward a backup or starting spot,” Longan told the Acorn. “We didn’t know who was going to go, but that gives me another year to improve my skill.”

Photos courtesy of Orange Pictures/USA Water Polo

Photos courtesy of Orange Pictures/USA Water Polo

The Moorpark native first suited up for water polo in the summer of 2011, just before her freshman year of high school. She recalled following her mother to the bathing suit section of a local Target, racks brimming with Fourth of July attire.

Kim Longan, Amanda’s mother, said her daughter had always been tall growing up. She said she struggled finding a suit that fit Amanda, who is now 6-foot-1.

Longan eventually picked out a one-piece—it was red, white and blue, of course.

“One-pieces don’t go so great on really tall girls,” Kim Longan said. “So to try to find a one-piece for a tall person . . . just wasn’t easy, especially at Target. I should’ve taken her to Dick’s Sporting Goods or something.”

Longan touched a water polo ball for the first time at a local club in Moorpark that summer. When asked to swim 100 meters at her first day of practice, she said she didn’t know how many laps to complete.

“It felt like the longest thing ever,” Longan said. “I couldn’t really breathe when I was going up and down (the pool), and I didn’t know how to get the ball from anybody. . . . It was a mess that very first day.”

She moved to goalie the next day. She has yet to leave the cage.

At Oaks Christian, Longan was only a few months into the sport and still finding her groove, but then-head coach Larry Felix, a former player for Pepperdine and Team USA, said he noticed Longan’s raw talent immediately.

“The first thing I noticed was her work ethic,” Felix said. “Then came just the natural talent that was showing . . . making saves and blocks on veteran, seasoned high school boys where you’re like, ‘That was impressive for someone who’s only been playing for a couple months.’”

By the summer of 2012, when Team USA took home gold at the London Olympics, Longan said making an Olympic roster became her dream. From practicing with Oaks Christian’s boys’ team to commuting more than 60 miles three times a week to play club for Santa Barbara 805, Longan was committed to the sport—even when it didn’t pay off.

She started out as a B-team goalie at Santa Barbara. She worked her way through USA Water Polo’s Olympic Development Program but faced rejection after rejection.

“She would be upset,” Felix said. “We would go over her evaluation, and I think almost every time I would read it, I would just go, ‘Throw it in the trash. They don’t see you every day and they don’t see what I see.’”

The goalkeeper led the Lions to their first league championship in school history her junior year, in 2014, when she was named the Tri-Valley League’s player of the year. The following year, during Longan’s senior season, the goalie broke Oaks Christian’s record for saves in a single game with 31.

In 2015, Longan was left off the U.S. Junior National Team travel roster, but then she got a call to replace a goalkeeper who had a conflict. Longan eventually led Team USA to gold at the 2015 FINA Junior World Championships and was named the tournament’s top goalkeeper.

“In my head, having the background (that I had) of playing on the national team and playing in college, I was just kind of like, “If you don’t play this girl, you’re kidding yourself,’” Felix said.

Jack Kocur, who coached Longan her senior year and is Oaks Christian’s current girls’ water polo head coach, said that although Longan had graduated by the time his team won its first CIF-Southern Section championship in 2019, her four-year run played a pivotal role in changing the team’s fortunes in the pool.

“She was the epitome of what our culture needed to be,” Kocur said.

As a Trojan, Longan averaged at least 10 saves per game every season in the cage, notching a career-best 11.03 saves per game her junior year. The goalkeeper finished second all-time at USC for career saves with 840.

In the 2018 national championship game against Stanford, Longan tipped an off-speed shot from Stanford’s Mackenzie Fischer off of a foul outside 5 meters in the final minute of the contest. Longan’s save sealed a 5-4 win for the Trojans, and it secured the squad’s second NCAA title in three years.

“She’s a pretty crafty shooter like that, and she likes to try that with me on the national team, too,” Longan said of Fischer. “It was a good shot. I wasn’t actually expecting that shot from her at that time. . . . I just knew it was going to come from her hand when it did come, and my legs were just all out.”

Longan cleaned up in the awards department, earning the Peter J. Cutino Award, National Player of the Year, Mountain Pacific Sports Federation Player of the Year and NCAA Tournament Most Valuable Player in 2018.

Paige Hauschild, an attacker at USC and a senior national teammate, said Longan is a role model. The friends, who also played club water polo together in Santa Barbara, are roommates in Long Beach.

“Her work ethic and just her commitment to the team was really unmatched,” Hauschild said. “Her positive energy is super infectious, so she’s really easy to be around.”

Before the pandemic hit, Longan traveled with the senior national team to Holland and Colorado Springs in February to train for the Tokyo Games. Following California’s recent ease to the shelter-at-home order, the team resumed non-contact training at the Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos.

Although Longan’s dream of eventually playing in the Olympics will be delayed, she said the stage in 2021 is going to feel special with the sports world finally uniting.

“It’s going to be even bigger this time around when we come back together the following summer after everything that every country in the world has been through,” Longan said.

For now, she will continue capping up, swimming laps, making saves—all while wearing red, white and blue.

IN A NUTSHELL

Amanda Longan, 23, is currently one of three goalkeepers for the U.S. women’s water polo senior national team. The goalie is an Oaks Christian High and USC graduate who aspires to become a sports psychologist after her water polo career. Longan grew up in Moorpark with her parents, John and Kim Longan, and her two sisters, Shelby, 25, and Andi, 21. Amanda Longan hopes to play in the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.

Amanda’s Favorites

• Movie: “Grown Ups”

• TV show: “Grace and Frankie”

• Book: “Unbroken” by Melody Grace

• Athlete: Betsey Armstrong

• Music genre: Country

• Food: Pizza

• Dream destination: Montana

Follow Acorn sports intern Joy Hong on Twitter @joy__ hong.