It’s 8:30 on a rainy Tuesday night, and members of the Georgetown men’s club water polo team stand huddled and shivering by their cars outside of Healy Gates. Forty minutes later, they will have stripped down to their Speedos at the Wakefield Recreation Center in Fairfax, Va. and plunged into the Olympic-sized pool to scrimmage against the Northern Virginia Masters team.
What could possess this group of non-varsity atheletes to drive half an hour out to Fairfax and splash around in a frigid pool four nights a week?
“I hate practice, but I love water polo,” said senior Marshall Spooner.
“I fell in love with the sport when I went out to California with the guys on the team and they taught me how to play,” said senior Evan Behr.
“If I couldn’t play water polo, I don’t know what my life would be like,” said junior Carlo Bena.
You get the picture.
Georgetown is currently ranked 16th of 99 club teams listed by the Collegiate Water Polo Association, and this November, the team’s love of the game will be taking them all the way to the club National Championship for the second straight season.
The Georgetown men’s club water polo team was founded in 1993 by Sam Bakhshandehpour (MSB ‘97) and Tony O’Brien (CAS ‘98), and consisted largely of varsity swimmers who wanted to play water polo on the side. Bakhshandehpour stayed on as the coach until the end of last season, and over the past five years the club has become one of the prominent teams in the Collegiate Water Polo Associaton Atlantic Division.
“Part of the reason we’re successful is that Sam had us together as a tight-knit group and his philosophy has been passed down from year to year,” said senior Rich Storey.
That philosophy, based, according to Storey, on “team effort, tight defense, smart play, cutting out mistakes and letting the offense fall into place,” has helped Georgetown to an 11-0 season this year. They have won tournaments at James Madison, UVA and Villanova, and defeated North Carolina State 14-11 to capture their second consecutive Atlantic Division title and an automatic berth in the National Championship, held this year at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo.
Last year, Georgetown finished 13th in its first National Championship appearance, led by league MVP Lee Conant and All-Conference first-teamer Eiki Hatakiyama, who have both graduated.
“We lost five seniors and three starters, so we didn’t know where we’d be this year,” said Behr. “Marshall, Rich, [junior] Matt Sullivan and I have had to step up and play different positions. Everyone thought we were finished, but we’ve come through.”
Behr has taken over for Conant as the hole-set, the heart of the water polo offense, and Sullivan has stepped into the equally vital hole-defense position. Graduate student Albert Won, who played four years of varsity water polo at University of California-Berkeley, leads the team in scoring with 33 goals, followed by Storey with 27 and Spooner with 24. Behr leads in assists with 42.
Coach Peter Freeman (SFS ‘02), who played club water polo for three years at Georgetown, took over as the team’s leader this season.
“Most of the time I’m still just one of the guys,” said Freeman. “But you need someone in the time-outs to do the talking and tell everyone to shut up.”
The team practices at Wakefield because it cannot get pool time at Yates Field House, and manages to cram its season into two tiring months to cut down on costs. While they do get some funding from Georgetown, they raised nearly $5,000, mostly in donations, to pay their way to tournaments.
“We lack the institutional support from the University that varsity teams have, but we make up for it with the leadership of our seniors and strong support from alumni and parents,” said Freeman. “I wouldn’t be suprised to see half a dozen alumni at Cal Poly.”
Georgetown’s first game in the National Championship will be against No. 8 University of Washington, who finished sixth last year.
“We can’t look past our first game,” said Freeman. “If we win that, we could easily finish in the top five or six in the country.”
While the National Championship will pit the team against schools like Cal Poly and University of Florida, who have larger rosters and more practice and pool time, the team is confident that it will have an even stronger finish than last year.
“No one in the league thought we had a chance this year, but we’re Georgetown water polo-?we don’t rebuild, we reload,” said Spooner.
