ROSEVILLE — The No. 2 Ripon boys water polo team won its third consecutive Sac-Joaquin Section championship Saturday, moving up to Division II against top-seeded Rocklin after two Division III championships.

A huge save by Indians goalie Ben Rogers with 24 seconds remaining stopped Rocklin’s last best chance at knotting the game and the Indians held on for a thrilling 14-13 come-from-behind win at the Roseville Aquatics Center and in doing so earned a berth in the NorCal championships.  

Ripon is the No. 7 seed in the NorCal Division II bracket and will travel to No. 2 Buchanan of Clovis in the opening round tonight. The game starts at 6. 

“You just have to do your best,” Rogers said. “It stopped their attack and they got just one more shot and it went wide.”

Ripon’s McKeane Beier (two goals, two steals) made a huge steal right in front of the Indians’ net with 1:25 left in the game and got the ball to his end of the pool quickly for Brody Biedermann to nail the eventual game-winning goal five seconds later.

“I had just sprinted all the way down the pool,” Beier said. “And I just had to make that big save which led to our leading goal.”

Biedermann caught fire in the fourth period, scoring four of his five goals in that final stanza to go along with his two assists and two steals.

“I was awful in the first half,” Biedermann said. “Then we got a momentum shift and I just rode on that momentum.”

With 2:21 left in the fourth period, the Indians (27-4) bounced three consecutive shots off the cross bar, and in a wild scrum after the third miss whistles blew and the Thunder goalie was called for a foul, giving Ripon a 5-meter penalty throw. Biedermann buried it for his third goal of the period and tied the game at 13-13.

“I’ve never seen that,” Biedermann said of that three-shot and then penalty sequence. “I really don’t know what happened, just that there was a lot of splashing.”

Indians coach Christian Britton concurred with Biedermann.

“I have only seen that once,” Britton said. “Kudos to us for staying close to the cage there.

“Down the stretch we just needed to get one or two stops. All year we have been able to score goals, but our issue has been being able to get the stop when it was needed.”

It was a back-and-forth affair with four ties and four lead changes. Ripon took a 5-2 lead at the end of the first period on Biedermann’s first goal off of an assist by Owen Curtiss (goal, assist, steal) only for Rocklin (23-9) to go on a 7-1 run to take a 9-6 halftime lead.

The Indians scored three goals in the first two minutes of the fourth period – the first one by Ben Svoboda (two goals, two steals) and the next two by Biedermann – to take the lead at 12-11, their first lead since the second period.

Ripon’s first title of the Indians’ trifecta came in 2021 with a team consisting of mainly freshman. Last year’s version was mostly sophomores, and Curtiss is the lone senior on this year’s edition.

“I knew I inherited a group with a ton of grit and a ton of fortitude,” Britton said. “You can’t teach that. You can foster that, but it is hard to teach that.

“They have been gritty since the first day I coached them which was the day after their eighth-grade graduation in the spring of three years ago. We had no idea we were going to win a D-III title that year. We were playing on house money and the expectations have since gone up every year.”

Ryan Bell (two goals), Chetan Harvey (goal), Nathan Selna (save, assist), Jaidan Chandar (assist) and Matthew Lee (save) rounded out the Ripon attack.

Aaron Ryu posted four goals for the Thunder followed by three apiece for Mason McKenzie, Rhett Wildenradt and Micah Anderson.

The Indians now await the NorCal pairings to be announced Sunday afternoon by the CIF state office.