Most students aren’t aware of Georgetown’s water polo team. Heck, I’m willing to wager that most Georgetown students aren’t really sure what water polo is. Nonetheless, there has been a club team since 1993, making for an 11-year tradition of which few of us are aware.
Coached by Evan Behr (MSB ‘03) and Matt Sullivan (CAS ‘04), the water polo team meets three to four times a week during the regular season, which runs from September to November. The team competes in three tournaments during the fall. While the first two are regular season tourneys, the third is the Conference Championship, which was held at UNC this year. The winner advances to the National Championships, this year at Notre Dame. This past season, the Hoyas finished second at UNC, just one win shy of Nationals.
The off-season begins in mid-January and extends until the end of the semester. The club practices only two to three times a week during this time. Surprisingly, this is the first year that they have been allowed to use the race pool in Yates for their practices. Even now, they can only secure slots of about 30 minutes, as the high demand for the pool keeps club usage to a minimum. The team also travels to northern Virginia every Tuesday, which is the only day of the week that they have access to a standard goal cage and pool. While most tournaments are during the regular season in the fall, the team is planning on attending an invitational sometime this spring.
“There will be invitational tournaments coming up this spring,” Darrell Zlotnick (CAS, 05) said. “We just haven’t decided which one to go to yet.”
The team’s roster is surprisingly diverse. While most would assume that water polo is a California-dominated sport, there are players from Ohio, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. About one in five players have no previous experience with the sport, and the team does not cut players. The current roster consists of 16 players. Most recruitment is done via the team’s little known website, studentorgs.georgetown.edu/waterpolo. This past year, each and every new player learned about the team through this site.
Practices this semester are held on Sundays and Wednesdays at Yates and Tuesdays in Northern Virginia. The team is very open to prospective players and demands a very low time commitment. The sport itself provides a great way to get into shape, as it is physically demanding, but is also just really, really fun to play. You don’t know bliss until you’ve rocketed a shot across the water like a skipping stone, bouncing it off the water and into the net.
