On Deck With Damon Newman, American Water Polo’s Director of Membership

Age group water polo was played in the Northeast—in particular the tri-state region of New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania—had been mothballed since March 2020, the result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

That is, until March 27 of this year.

As they have for the past two decades, the Main Line League in the Philadelphia suburbs started then, offering hundreds of athletes the much-needed opportunity to play a sport they love—and one they’ve missed for more than a year.

Damon Newman, Director of Membership for American Water Polo, which oversees Main Line League competition, recently spoke about the challenges of restarting age group polo after an extended layoff, how the fall PA high school league provided a push to get AWP play started and how many of the hurdles to competition have been successfully negotiated thus far.

- AWP competition is three weeks in. What’s your assessment of how things have gone?

It’s gone pretty well. Pennsylvania water polo was played in the fall so everyone was itching to get back. The Main Line League traditionally starts up in late March, so we said to ourselves: At least there’s a starting point to play because water polo was played in the fall. Let’s see what we can do here. Can we restart the Main Line League because we had to cancel last year?

We were coming from a position that a lot of the high school coaches who run their club teams had been through a COVID season in 2020 and were able to play. So we thought we could start something this spring.

- From my perspective, things couldn’t be going better. The organization has been excellent, the competition has been good, and—due to a no spectator rule— matches are streamed so parents get to see their kids have fun in the water.

The no spectator rule was something where we couldn’t get a consensus from pool operators. A lot of their procedures are driven by their facilities. With the pandemic, there tends to be different information from other states, other counties. School districts have similar rules but there where a handful who said, “no spectators.”

From our point of view you it wouldn’t be fair for someone who’s driving to XYZ pool and there’s no spectators, then I drive to another pool and there are. To be equitable, we decided it was best to have no spectators. That was the tact we had to take but it’s fair to everyone involved.

The live feeds put on by the schools—we’re putting the information out there; the schools have been doing live feeds with their teams for a couple of months, having to stream a lot of games due to COVID restrictions.

- It’s been a really long time since many of have gotten to see live polo in this region, so it’s a real plus for this season.

Have there been any COVID issues yet this season?

We haven’t had any cancellations for COVID cases. Some of the things we put in place—we’d run two courses the same time, each 50 minutes, there would be a lot more people on the deck and in the stands. The games are now running on the hour and 15, there a three-team round-robin then a new set of people playing.

We tried to eliminate any sort of crossover—two games back-to-back or one game on, one game off. Teams have to clear the deck. We’ve done a pretty good job keeping people separate and minimizing any kind of crossover between teams.

- I was struck by Commissioner Sharadin’s letter addressing the underlying principle of fairness in competition after a year when so many athletes were unable to practice or compete. Not all teams are the same but to put it on the coaches to make competition fair seemed to be a refreshing attitude at this moment.

We’ve always wanted kids to play whether it’s a COVID season or not. Any team you run a league from year to year, you know who plays a lot, who has a lot of kids involved—this team is going to be strong than that team.

However, it’s a really hard thing to predict top to bottom. We’ve always tried to make it as level as possible and get teams to play [others] of like ability.

It’s been doubly tough this season because people have been out of the water and they’re not practicing as much as they were while some teams have only had a couple of days of practice and this is their first competition since the fall. Or even spring 2020.

What we’re trying to do is get athletes back in the water and enjoy the game that we all love. To administrate, to coach and to create opportunities for athletes to enjoy the sport.

In years past we’ve had a self-selected elite league for 18U boys. If you wanted to play teams that were smaller and we’re considered at a higher level, you could opt-in for that.

This year for the 18U boys we broke it into two divisions—what we thought were strong teams versus some like-minded teams. Last year we had a 14U competitive bracket which was new to us. We looked at the 14U division; we had so many teams playing and the scores—it just wasn’t as competitive as we’d like.

We set up a recreational division and a competitive division and we split that between genders as best we could.

We didn’t have that this year because we didn’t know how much pool time we’d get. We were trying to maximize each opportunity as we can to get kids to play. We didn’t have that flexibility, especially being limited to one course in a lot of the pools where we usually would run two.

- Are there some things that you, Dan and others hope to improve upon?

What we would like to see is more age group water polo being played in the summertime. Traditionally we’ll have a big league in the spring and a lot of those teams do summer swimming, they go to camps—they do something else. They’re not taking that spring water polo into summer and then rolling it into the fall.

What we’d love to see is having a summer league—Jason Grubb from North Penn runs a high school league and a small 14U league. They do some stuff up in Reading area for age group.

We’d love to expand that to a couple of other sites and keep kids involved to play more in the summer compared to what we’ve seen in the past.