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Cal’s Spieker Aquatic Center will host a world-class event today, as the current Olympic champion Australian women’s national water polo team will face the team it beat for the gold medal in 2000, the U.S. national team. The match, which starts at 12:30 p.m., is the final game of a four-city northern California tour for the teams.

But while the teams do have some of the same players that faced off in Sydney, Australia, in the Olympics, the U.S. has undergone some changing of the guard. Since the Sydney games, Maureen O’Toole, a pioneer for women’s water polo for the past twenty plus years, has officially retired from the U.S. team, leaving a new generation of athletes to carry the torch. Team USA will depend on Coralie Simmons,a group of Junior National Players that won the FINA World Championship in 1999 in addition to Olympic hero Yvette Higgins and starting Olympic goalkeeper Liz Weekes.

Tickets to the match are $10 at the gate. There will be an exhibition match beforehand by youth teams made up of players from the Bay Area.