St Mary's Col­lege and Bish­op Anstey High School cap­tured the Open Boys and Girls Di­vi­sion ti­tles when the 2020 Re­pub­lic Bank-spon­sored Na­tion­al Sec­ondary Schools Wa­ter Po­lo League con­clud­ed at the Na­tion­al Aquat­ic Cen­tre in Bal­main, Cou­va on Sun­day.

Both fi­nals failed to live up to the hype though as both the "Saints" and Bish­op Anstey won their re­spec­tive crowns with rel­a­tive ease, 16-6 and 13-7 against Fa­ti­ma Col­lege and St Joseph Con­vent (Port-of-Spain) re­spec­tive­ly.

In the Boys' Open de­cider, the Justin Bod­den-coached "Saints" stormed in­to a 5-0 lead at the end of the first quar­ter, and de­spite a fight-back from Fa­ti­ma in the sec­ond pe­ri­od, led com­fort­ably at the half-time in­ter­val, 8-4.

The third quar­ter proved to be very de­ci­sive in the out­come with the Saints dom­i­nat­ing 4-1 to push their ad­van­tage to 12-5 be­fore outscor­ing their ri­vals by the same mar­gin in the fi­nal pe­ri­od to com­plete their task.

Bish­op Anstey al­so made a rous­ing start to the Girls Open cham­pi­onship match and led 5-1 at the end of the first quar­ter be­fore ex­tend­ing it to 7-2 dur­ing the sec­ond pe­ri­od.

The third was a low scor­ing pe­ri­od with Bish­op Anstey un­der the su­per­vi­sion of coach Ethan El­liot adding two goals to their tal­ly while keep­ing their op­po­nents score­less be­fore adding four more in the fi­nal quar­ter to St Joseph Con­vent's two.

St Joseph Con­vent (PoS) had much bet­ter for­tune in their three di­vi­sion­al fi­nals played ear­li­er on Sat­ur­day and Sun­day, sweep­ing the Form One, Un­der-14 and Un­der-16 age-groups crowns to the de­light of head coach­es Jameel At­teih and Justin Bod­den who coached both the Un­der-14 and Un­der-16 teams.

In the Form One fi­nal, St Joseph Con­vent edged Bish­op Anstey 4-3 while they eked out a 12-11 gold­en-goal win af­ter an 11-all fin­ish to win their best-of-three round-robin se­ries against the same op­po­nents fol­low­ing an 11-8 win in the first match.

And in the Un­der-16 de­cider, they thumped Bish­op Anstey 10-1.

Fa­ti­ma Col­lege and coach Ryan West al­so had rea­sons to cel­e­brate on the day af­ter they won the Form One and Un­der-14 Di­vi­sion fi­nals in con­trast­ing fash­ion.

The Mu­cu­rapo Road-based Fa­ti­ma 'A' pow­ered past St Mary's Col­lege 10-4 to take home the Form One ti­tle while in the Un­der-14 du­el, Fa­ti­ma de­feat­ed Queen's Roy­al Col­lege 4-1 on penal­ties af­ter both teams bat­tled to an en­ter­tain­ing 10-10 dead­lock.

The Roy­alians did not leave the venue with­out pre­cious gold­en sil­ver­ware as they made amends in the Un­der-16 Boys fi­nal, with a nar­row 5-4 sud­den-death penal­ty shoot-out vic­to­ry over their "Saints" ri­val af­ter claw­ing their way back from 3-1, 5-2 and 7-5 quar­ter deficits to draw 8-8 at full-time.