Jamaica’s men’s and women’s water polo teams registered mixed results to open their campaign on a creditable note at the Carifta Water Polo Championships in The Bahamas yesterday.

Both the men’s Under-19 and the women’s teams have progressed to the finals of the championships, which will culminate at the Betty Kelly Kenning Swim Complex today.

On Friday’s opening day, the Under-19 men’s fought gallantly to better the host nation 16-14 in a closely contested encounter, but later secured a more comfortable victory with a 16-7 beating of Barbados.

But there were no such fortunes for the Under-16 men’s outfit that lost narrowly, 7-8, at the hands of Barbados, and the women’s Under-19 team fell 2-10 to defending champions Trinidad & Tobago.

However, yesterday’s second day saw the tables turned significantly with the Under-19 women’s showing depth to rebound for an 11-2 win over Barbados in what was a very strong performance.

They returned later in the evening to again defeat Barbados 17-2 to book their spot in the final against Trinidad & Tobago.

Captain Rachel Minto-Walker is backing her team to get the job done and take home the gold medal.

“We played two tough games to make it to the semi-final and we are hoping to win. I am confident in my team that we will win to make it to the final and come home with the gold,” she said shortly after their victory.

Meanwhile, the Under-19 men remained perfect with a 17-1 trouncing of Bonaire and are now set to vie for a top spot today. The Under-16 boys defeated Bonaire 15-3 in a play-off yesterday for a chance to play for the bronze medal after earlier going down 9-10 to The Bahamas in another close fixture.

Captain Keith-Jordan Wilkinson was beaming about the accomplishments of his team in keeping a perfect record.

“We won all our games and we are pretty excited it is still a work in progress and we plan to do even better going forward. So even though we did pretty well in the games that we played, we are going back to practise some new tactics and hopefully with that we can win the tournament and bring back the gold to Jamaica,” he noted.