On Deck With St. Benedict’s Glenn Cassidy: Water Polo Flourishes in Newark

Water polo is a minor but pernicious sport that thrives in the brilliant sunlight of California—and occasionally in the indoor depths of the Northeast. One such Eastern variant is the polo program at St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark, New Jersey. Not a polo powerhouse like North Penn High School outside of Philadelphia or Brunswick Academy in Greenwich, the Gray Bees boast a respectable tradition, one dating back to 1989, when polo arrived at the urban prep school founded in 1868.

Glenn Cassidy (class of 1990) was there for the sport’s beginning at St. B’s… and he’s still there 32 years later, excepting a hiatus to earn an undergraduate degree at Notre Dame. Now in his 28th year working at St. Benedict’s, Cassidy—who earned a master’s degree at nearby St. Peter’s and a doctorate in education from Rutgers—has been player, coach, referee and evangelist for Gray Bees polo. Most recently he has become consoler-in-chief due to the untimely passing of former St. B’s coach Spencer Vespole.

[Mr. Spencer Vespole: Witty Teacher, Dedicated Coach, Beloved by All]

In a wide-raging interview, Cassidy spoke about learning polo from Jim Schmidt during a summer at the Newark Boys and Girls Club, his path to running the school’s polo program, the challenges of fielding a team of athletes that loo entirely different from most in a lily-white sport, and the loss of Vespole. who died from cancer in 2019 at the age of 29.

- Some of your work at St. Benedict’s includes team-building for multiple groups and grades.

I run the Appalachian Trail program and have also been responsible over the years for our student leaders and new students—our ninth grade students. For 20 years I’ve been responsible for their orientation and bringing them into the community. Now I’m mostly responsible for the girls but have been involved in building community at the school for a while.

- Are your institution’s values at the core of all that you do at the school?

These values guide a lot that I do, even how we set up in water polo. Guys understand what it means to be good sports, how to work hard, how to take care of one another. From any of our teams you’ll hear words thrown around [like]: It’s more than just a team, it’s a family. Students buy into being accountable to one another. We constantly use a phrase: Give up what you want for what we need.

A few years ago one of our team captains told me he was going to miss practice the Saturday before our first game because he had to go on a college trip. We went back and forth but he said he couldn’t get out of it. He had to go.

Then practice came on Saturday and he was there. I looked at him and said: I thought you weren’t coming. He said: Give up what you want for what we need.

- You went for a BA at Notre Dame, then a master’s degree at St. Peter’s in Jersey City. You have maintained a connection with values espoused by the Catholic Church.

I grew up Catholic and all the way up until my doctoral program I only attended Catholic schools; Catholic grammar school, Catholic high school, Catholic college, Catholic master’s program. There’s no question I firmly bought into the Benedictine mantra of humility and the concepts of work and pray that the monks live by.

- Those values include: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

If you want to stick on the religious nature of things, it may have been God jumping into my life [for polo]. When I was in high school, it was the summer going into my junior year and I was a lifeguard at a Boys and Girls club in Newark. The pool manager at the time [Schmidt] was a swim coach and someone who was playing on an adult water polo team. That summer while lifeguarding he decided to teach me about the sport.

I didn’t know what I was getting into but he led me through it. He told me: Why don’t you come and play with us at the Garden State Games at Rutgers this weekend? It’s an open tournament for all kinds of sports.

Nevertheless he kept teaching me things—how to do the eggbeater, how to pass. We were building a pool at St. Benedict’s [where the water polo and swim teams currently compete]. The previous year a group of us began practicing swimming at another location. In my junior year, we started our swim team for competitions. The coach we hired [Brian Ippolito], who was also the pool director, had a background in polo.

Given that we were part of the [New Jersey] sports association and tied to practicing guidelines, our coach tried to figure out how he could get us started in swimming early because he had a lot of kids who were new. He wanted to get started earlier than November 15 without getting in trouble—and realized that water polo is in the fall.

He started us in polo as a means to get into shape for the swim season. I had just started learning water polo so It was just a natural fit.

That first year was 1988, but we didn’t play any games because the pool wasn’t finished. Just a lot of workouts. We went to Montclair Kimberly Academy—they had a pool and a team at that time—and worked out and scrimmaged with them.

1989 was the first year where we formally had games—that’s where it all started.

- You got drawn back to St. Benedict’s, to water polo—which leads to Spencer Vespole.

Spencer was one of those guys his whole life he was a bit left of center. He was never not being himself. Always strong opinions but surprisingly open-minded.

I don’t remember what made him join the team. He just came out for it—part of me that thinks he may have got cut from the soccer team.

He didn’t start out as an amazing water polo player. He developed over the years as a swimmer and a polo player. He fell in love with it in high school more than I realized. He was never one who talked about water polo beyond high school [like] other kids.

When he went to Bowdoin he got fully invested [in polo]. Not only was he playing but he was asked to coach. He was in an education program at Bowdoin so he had to do student teaching. He came back to St. Benedict’s a year before he graduated for a semester and asked if he could come down and work with the water polo team. He brought the skills he had learned as a player and a coach to the guys, and it went really well.

[Remembering a Legend: Mr. Vespole ‘09 Memorial]]

When he decided to come on full time, I said: let’s make it work. After the first year we were co-head coaches and that was the transition for me to get out and him to get in.

- When you join an institution like St. Benedict’s, are you so compelled by the organization’s mission and devoted staff that you quickly become a lifer?

A big part of the success of St. Benedict’s is that between 40 – 50% of our faculty are alumni. There’s both a spoken and unspoken expectation that a certain number of students will come back and work here. Some return for two, three, four years. Some do it—only at St. Benedict’s could we call it medium term; 10 or15 years.

Some of us do it forever. I’m on year 28 and I’m nowhere near the longest running alumnus on the property. In the monastery, a significant number of the monks are alumni.

There’s a feeling of being home. Pre pandemic, it was a rare day when you don’t have at least one alumnus walking around. Sometimes 2, 3, 4, 5—especially when you get to college breaks and things like that.

Being a community is not only what we do here every day. It’s not just our current faculty and students. It’s well beyond that—those who have graduated. Faculty members who were here, did their time, weren’t necessarily Benedict people but keep in touch with us all the time. They left for pay, for some other reason, but still believe they’re part of the place.

The idea of this place being a home for everybody that’s involved contributes to the idea of Spencer and other coming back. When I started college I didn’t think I was coming back here; by the time I finished college it seemed like the right move.

When I came back I told Father Edwin, our headmaster: I’ll be her two or three years.

I’ve missed that mark by a bit.

- The bonds between St. Benedict’s folks are special. How was your community affected by Spencer’s death?

Everybody loved Spencer. Even people who didn’t like Spencer loved Spencer. Spence always had disheveled hair and dressed colorfully. When we had the funeral everyone was dressed up but someone said: Why did we dress up for Spencer’s funeral? We should have come in mismatched t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. That’s how he would have come.

He was this charming guy who you had to love. I don’t know if quantifying his love is possible but I will say this: In the days before he passed his mom said to me: Benedict’s meant the world to him. We would appreciate it if you will all just do [the funeral]. Go with what you want; we’ll put it all in your hands.

Along with Father Augustine, who’s the prior of the monastery, I did a lot of planning. In my other world, when I’m not at St. Benedict’s I’m also a volunteer EMT. I’ve been to firefighter and police officer funerals. A couple of weeks before Spencer died there was a big shootout in Jersey City. A police officer had been killed and then a mile away these two people went and they [attacked] a Muslim school. They ended up in a major shootout with the police.

The detective who was killed that day was one of our parents. We had sent a group of students to the funeral. In light of that, while I was working with others to plan [Spencer’s] funeral, I said: Police officers and firefighters know how to send their people out right. We should send our person out right. We designed the whole service to be a true celebration of Spencer.

It was packed. We had all of our students there. We had 200 other alumni members and guests. Steve Droste from Pingry and Mike Koziol, the Germantown coach came. It was an amazing day. Everyone who walked out of there said: We sent Spencer off right.

- How is it that kids who have never played water polo before arriving at St. Benedict’s in four years they’re playing at a competitive level?

We have a tradition here of providing sports that aren’t typically at urban schools. Sports like fencing, water polo, crew, golf. We don’t have a football team. We do have soccer and basketball, but our sports line-up is not typical for an urban school.

Having water polo and swimming plays into that.

When I came back to work here in 1994 we had 24 kids total in the water polo program. When Schmidt left, Sherif Upton, an alumnus, took over the team and I was his assistant. I was a full-time staff member here; Sherif was not. In my role as a full-time staff member, it became easier and easier to connect with them and get them to join.

We never had a policy that you knew how to swim; in fact Sherif, when he started as a student, couldn’t swim. The first time he got in the pool—we were students together—I had to save him.

He got very good and went on to become a swimmer at Montclair State University. He coached here for years before he decided to leave for new opportunities.

Once I started connecting with the students it wasn’t hard to get them to join. After that first year we quickly jumped up to having numbers in the mid-30s. In the early 2000s we established an activity requirement for all our students. Any student new to the school that year has to do at least two activities per year. Which could be non-athletic but it’s easiest to do it if they’re sports. Any returning student has to do at least one activity.

That created a demand, because kids had to find something to do. A lot of kids started joining, so the numbers grew into the 40s.

Then there was an interesting boom; Cullen Jones, who won a gold medal in Beijing Games (2008) and silver and gold medals in London (2012) is one of our alumni. He played two years of water polo, he swam for us and was a student leader here.

When he made the 2008 Olympics that was a big deal. We watched some of his races with students and saw a boom in water polo and swimming. We called it the Cullen Jones effect. That year we had 60-some kids on the team.

For several years after that we were carrying a load of between 50 and 60 kids. It’s kind of hovered in the 40s and 50s ever since.

- What are your thoughts about USA Water Polo’s Racial Equity and Diversity task force? Will this effort and others allow for the sport to grow among populations who have not typically been able to access pool time and competitive polo opportunities? Is this perhaps an extension of what’s been going on for decades at St. Benedict’s?

In my younger and more ambitious years, Sherif, Jim Schmidt and I tried to open up the sport and [include] more people of color and from diverse economic backgrounds into the sport. Back then we were friendly with Bruce Wigo when he was responsible for U.S. Water Polo. We were involved with other people [including] Mike Schofield from the Naval Academy.

[USA Water Polo Racial Equality & Reform Task Force Hosts Town Hall Discussions on Zoom]

Schmidt worked with Bruce for grant money to encourage schools around [us] to start water polo. We pulled in local schools that had swim teams and tried to convince them to start water polo. It didn’t work at all.

We looked for teams across the country which were more diverse in nature, specifically Black and Latino [athletes]. We weren’t having much success finding that in water polo.

In swimming every year on Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday that weekend they have the MLK meet in D.C. It attracts predominately Black and Latino teams. We wanted to do something similar for water polo. We were just not able to make it happen.

[That’s a] long-winded way of saying, yes. I’d like to see the sport open up. I tell this story often but when I started coaching in 1994, we were still new enough and just started going places.. We had been to a lot more regional [events] but were starting to get out to some of the bigger [tournaments]. When we would walk into tournament, everything would stop and people would turn and look at us. I saw it happen more than once.

Our kids saw it happen and we talked about it. We used it to get better and to make sure we knew what we were doing and that we belonged.

It’s different now. You walk in now and people don’t blink an eye. 20-something years ago that wasn’t the case.

We definitely had times of unfair treatment. One tournament in Maryland, the coach of the other team came to me and apologized for how bad the calls were from the refs. The coach himself said: I can’t help but believe this is racially motivated. So we did experience some of these things.

During that same time we attended a water polo convention USA Water Polo was holding in Florida. They had put together an ad-hoc committee on race. Sherif and I sat down with a bunch of other people from the sport and kicked around ways to expand [polo].

Going back to American Water Polo, they were involved with this too. Dan Sharadin, who was instrumental in starting AWP, that was part of his mentality. He wanted to open the sport up to more people. He didn’t want it to just be an elite sport. That’s why he and I connected so well.

- What’s next for you and your water polo connection?

I’m winding down in my water polo role. I officiate here and I help out other local schools when I can. I’m an administrator at Benedict’s so my time is tight and doesn’t allow for me to do a whole lot.

I like taking the grandfather role now. I enjoy coming in and refereeing. This year has been challenging, learning all the new rules. I love going down once every few weeks spending some time with the guys. It’s like a clinic for a few minutes—which for me is fun.

At this point, other than being a fan of the sport, I’m a driver here at school. So I’ll take the team to a lot of their away games. So I get to enjoy it without having to be responsible for it.