A quietly phenomenal year for Crescenta Valley's Sabrina Hatzer

To hear Sabrina Hatzer talk about her exploits and achievements in the pool during a stellar senior season, you wouldn't really come away thinking it was all that stellar.

But for the seemingly always reserved and soft-spoken Crescenta Valley High girls' water polo player and swimmer, 2011-12 was quite phenomenal indeed. So phenomenal, in fact, that she was recently voted the 2011-12 Glendale News-Press Girls' Athlete of the Year.

Having started her days as a water polo player for the first time as a freshman at CV with no knowledge of the game, she morphed quite quickly into the 2011-12 All-Area Girls' Water Polo Player of the Year. On a team that had lost 12 seniors, Hatzer returned with playing experience, but jumped into a go-to role during a season for the ages in which Crescenta Valley duplicated its Pacific League title success from a year prior along with an ascent to the CIF Southern Section Division V semifinals, but did so by winning its first 31 games, with its undefeated season coming to a close via a 9-7 loss to Temescal Canyon.

Hatzer, the Pacific League's Player of the Year and an All-CIF standout, scored a team-high 106 goals — good enough for the fourth-highest single-season total in program history. In addition she added 42 assists and 61 steals for a Falcons squad defined by defense and team play that rattled off nailbiting upsets of the likes of Harvard-Westlake and La Serna in nonleague play before a dramatic quarterfinal, overtime win over Los Altos in the playoffs.

It was a season to remember not just for the Falcons, but for Hatzer, who just the season prior had shined coming off the bench for the Falcons.

And while she began her Falcons days as a water polo player simply because trying something new interested her, her days as a competitive swimmer were just as unlikely, as she took the sport up simply to supplement water polo.

But when all was said and done, she had played a focal role in the Falcons' swimming team winning its fifth straight team title, while she was part of league title-winning swims in both the 200-yard medley relay and 200-freestyle relay. Hatzer would swim on both relays, as well as in the 100 breaststroke, at the CIF finals.

Four total Pacific League titles, swimming in three CIF finals races and leading her team to a CIF semifinal in water polo. Not a bad year, indeed.