With Focus on Splash Ball, USAWP Invests in NYC’s Polo Future
Last weekend Inclusive Community Wellness, my nonprofit organization, began a new session of splash ball at The Leman Manhattan School in downtown Manhattan. This is not a new development; we’ve been running splash ball programs at Leman for the past year. What’s different is that USA Water Polo stepped up with a grant, so this program is free to all participants. It’s a huge development—thank you very much USAWP!—because in a city of 8.8 million people there are way too few kids playing water polo.
We absolutely have to change this, and with the support we’re getting—a private donor is also subsidizing our splash ball program—we can get 20 participants in the water learning about a fantastic, athletic sport that rewards intelligent play. In fact, more than 20 kids showed up on our first day, which means we have to expand. Immediately.
Splash ball is growing at The Leman Manhattan School in Downtown Manhattan. Photo: M. Randazzo
But that’s what it will take to finally get polo growing again in the so-called Greatest City in the World. It’s not like there hasn’t been water polo here for a long time. If you go back sixty years—which I just did (metaphorically speaking) in researching the 1964 Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School team which won an AAU Junior National Championship—you’ll find The Big Apple has enjoyed success in the sport. Chris Judge, a pillar of the New York Athletic Club’s polo program, was a standout at Fordham University and a member of USA national teams in the early 80s as well as NYAC’s title winning men’s program for decades. Chris’ father, Dr. Francis Xavier Judge, the father of Ram polo, introduced the sport to Rose Hill in 1949. “Fran” as he was known was also a ferocious polo combatant in NYAC pool in Midtown Manhattan and a tremendous advocate for the sport in NYC.
[Charlie Gulotta and The Unbelievable Story of Bishop Loughlin Water Polo]
There’s Wolf Wigo, a schoolboy phenomenon from Bronx Science High School who, thanks to the efforts of Carl Quigley and many others, is the greatest polo athlete the Northeast has ever produced. Two national championships at Stanford and three Olympic team berths—including two as captain—are just the tip of Wigo’s success. He’s co-owner (with Brad Schumacher, a double Olympian—swimming and polo—who’s from Maryland) of KAP7, one of the world’s leading suppliers of water polo equipment. He’s also been the head coach for the UC Santa Barbara men’s team the past two decades.
In 1991 Wigo left for the sunny shores of California; he has yet to return.
Wolf Wigo. Photo: Water Polo Planet
There have been successful individual polo athletes from NYC since then. Clyde Huibregtse, another Bronx Science alumni, had a respectable career playing for MIT’s men’s team from 2016-19. Elektra Urbatch is currently a member of the defending NCAA champion UCLA women’s team.
If you do the math, that’s three standout polo athletes in three decades; not a stellar record for the nation’s largest city.
Three also happens to be the number of age group clubs in New York City. The two most active clubs are Asphalt Green in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and Brooklyn Hustle in Downtown Brooklyn. Both clubs have healthy enrollment and routinely travel all over the country for competition. Asphalt Green just sent a 12U coed squad to Rocktober, a USAWP youth tournament in Mesa, Arizona. All well and good—and expensive—but in recent years, due to a lack of local athletes, AG has imported foreign athletes to be competitive in regional and national tournaments. It’s a short-term strategy that reflects a paucity of qualified NYC-born athletes.
The Hustle also recruits local players for their travel team but their inability to consistently compete outside of the Northeast creates doubt about pricey trips to Florida, Texas and California for Junior Olympics (JO) competition.
Y Pro, the third NYC club, consistently produces the city’s best age group players. But they too are hampered by a scarcity of competitive athletes; in recent years Y Pro’s 18U boys team—they don’t include girls in their program—have merged with CT Premier, a Connecticut-based club, to field squads for JO play. This can be wonderful for individual development but it’s another indication that there aren’t enough young, well-trained polo athletes in NYC to produce successful, home-grown teams.
The underlying impression is there’s a scarcity of interested youngsters to feed clubs’ development pipelines, a process that starts with attracting 6, 7 and 8 year-olds to the sport and providing them with the right coaching to develop fundamental skills. Which puts a spotlight on the splash ball programs we, AG and Hustle offer.
Polo grows in Queens with Coach Cesar Gonzalez. Photo: M. Randazzo
It’s also essential to expand to areas where young swimmers are plentiful and where polo will be an enticing option. Out in Bayside, Queens a group of players are learning fundamentals from Cesar Gonzalez, who leads a group of 20 beginners. It looks like Queens might be the city’s best option for growing a fourth age group club out of the city’s most diverse borough. It won’t be easy; like all parts of the city it’s imperative that coaches, parents and players work together to ensure a viable path to competition.
USAWP, a California-based organization undergoing a transition due to the arrival of a new CEO, must nurture that growth. And, under different conditions than exist in the Golden State, where pool time and qualified coaches are plentiful.
[Tara Prentice, US Water Polo Olympian, Leads NYC Parks Clinic]
If the time is now for rebuilding New York’s polo culture, the signs are good that process is underway.