Women Coaches Rise Up Through the Ranks of NCAA Men’s Polo

While not exactly a feminist revolution in NCAA water polo, recent hirings of Morgan Allison-Prokhin, Alyssa Diacono and Lindsay Garcia to coach at Long Island University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Occidental College respectively signals a welcome shift for men’s and women’s collegiate water polo.

These new coaches are leading men’s teams; Allison-Prokhin and Garcia will also coach their schools women’s squads. Which is typical; in all of NCAA athletics, female coaches almost exclusively only lead women. It’s the rare woman given a chance to head a collegiate program with male athletes. 

According to WeCoach, a nonprofit organization that seeks to advance women coaches in all sports, out of 9,291 total NCAA men's teams head coaching opportunities, 574 are led by women—a paltry 6%. That holds true for water polo; among the 43 DI, DII and DIII men’s polo programs, only Allison-Prokhin, Diacono, Garcia and McKendree’s Colleen Lischwe currently lead men’s teams.

Of these four, LIU’s Allison-Prokhin may have had the choppiest path to a head coaching position. Hired last spring as former Head Coach Gabby Juarez’s second coach—Petar Momcilovic was Juarez’s top assistant—Allison-Prokhin immediately assumed a more senior role when Momcilovic quit in May. Then, when Juarez resigned mid-August, the former St. Francis College (Brooklyn) women’s captain was thrust into Shark polo’s top spot. In true LIU fashion—since 2019 Long Island University has had six athletics directors, the most turnover of any NCAA DI program—prior to the Sharks’ first match in early September it was not clear who the LIU head coach was; luckily Allison-Prokhin has ably stepped in to lead the program.

The Sharks (6-10; 1-3 NWPC) have done reasonably well, led by Josep Jodra Muñoz (47 goals) and Riyad Shehadeh (40) , two former St. Francis players. The Sharks are currently fifth in the Northeast Water Polo Conference (NWPC) and are two wins off of their previous highest total of 8 last year. A trip this weekend to Cambridge for the Harvard/Brown Invite could result in LIU surpassing that previous win total. After that, it’s out to California for the Julian Fraser Memorial and a stretch run to the NWPC Tournament in Princeton next month.

In recent contests between NWPC rivals, MIT and their new head coach Diacono traveled to New York City for matches against Iona and LIU, and then up to Providence to face Brown. The results were (mostly) as expected. Iona and Brown beat the Beavers handily; the match-up against LIU was close but resulted in a 15-12 Shark win when they outscored the Engineers by three in the final quarter. MIT (3-11; 0-5 NWPC) is currently on a six-match losing streak, including a 21-12 loss at Harvard last Sunday night. 

The reality is that their NWPC opponents are not the best targets for the Engineers; it’s qualifying for the NCAA DIII Championships at Huntington Beach in December. A journey they’ll begin this Saturday in Baltimore when they face host Johns Hopkins, Connecticut College and Washington and Jefferson. The top two finishers qualify for the Eastern half of the DIII bracket. MIT has already beaten Hopkins—14-12 a month ago in Providence—and should have little trouble with the Camels of Conn College or the Presidents.

Hiring Diacono, who as recently as 2023 was coaching both the men’s and women’s team at Mount St. Mary’s, is a coup. After MSM hired her in 2020 to launch water polo it was impressive that Diacono could build TWO programs in the midst of Covid, recruiting athletes from all over the U.S. and Europe. The first seasons for MSM were tough; no new program, especially in the East, has much hope for success. By year two The Mount men were 15-14, competing in the tough Mid-Atlantic Water Polo Conference, which includes Bucknell, Fordham, George Washington, Johns Hopkins and Navy. 

Diacono’s women’s teams did not fare so well while she was in Emmitsburg (23-52, including 0-15 their first season), but she left a strong core that succeeded in earning The Mount’s first-ever MAAC playoff berth and win. Now coached by Justin Vink—beginning in July 2023—last April the MSM women shocked defending champs LIU in the opening round of the MAAC tournament, when Beatrice Viere scored on a backhand with six seconds remaining for a 9-8 victory.

A strong recruiter who traces her coaching philosophy back to Carin Crawford, renowned former head coach of the San Diego State women’s program—where she played from 2014 - 2017—Diacono’s biggest challenge will be getting talented polo athletes through the nation’s toughest admissions policy. This is the reason that the Beavers have had a roughly 2-3 year cycle of bringing in new coaches. 

And, it’s not that the MIT Athletics Department hasn’t identified qualified leaders. Previous Beavers head coaches include Omar Amr—a former Olympian who played at UC Irvine under Ted Newland; Adam Foley, one-time George Washington men’s and women’s coach who in 2007 engineered a 16-11-1 season, the only winning MIT season since Jeff Ma produced a 23-9 record in 2003; Felix Mercado, long-time head coach for Browns men’s and women’s programs; Mark Lawrence, who founded Austin College’s men’s and women’s programs; Dave Andriole, whose 2015 side stunned East Coast power St. Francis; and Austin Ringheim, Diacono’s immediate predecessor who spent five years in Cambridge before departing for a job as Gavin Arroyo’s assistant at Long Beach State.

Hampering MIT’s recruiting is that they are a DIII program on the East Coast that plays a majority of its matches against DI programs, including Brown, Princeton and Harvard. Those esteemed intellectual institutions have no problem looking the other way to get desirable foreign-born polo athletes through the Ivy League’s stringent admissions process. MIT; they don’t even count legacy as an admission standard.

The coach with the best results thus far—and perhaps the brightest future in NCAA water polo—is Lindsey Garcia at Occidental. She replaced interim coach Joe Cox, who stepped in for Jack Stabenfeldt after what must be cited as a missed opportunity for Oxy polo. The De Mandel Aquatics Center—a superb facility for men’s / women’s swimming and water polo—opened in 2020 and gave Oxy one of the best aquatics facilities in all of DIII. But Tigers polo stumbled, recording an overall 49-91 record (39-47 for the men; 10-44 for the women) since their new pool opened.

Part of that missed opportunity is that Occidental, one of the most desirable small liberal arts colleges in California, is a potential destination for talented East Coast players looking to move west. As it is, the current men’s roster is dotted with non-Californians, including players from Illinois, Michigan, Washington (state) and Oregon. The results thus far: an 11-5 record including wins over Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC) members CalTech and Claremont-Mudd-Scripps. Even a 15-10 loss to perennial DIII power Pomona-Pitzer cannot dampen enthusiasm for the Tigers’ best start in years; they’ve already won more games than last (10-15; 5-7 SCIAC).

Coach Garcia comes to Tigers water polo after a playing career at Cal State University Northridge followed by an assistant coaching stint at SCIAC member Caltech. Conveniently for Tigers’ recruiting, she also coached for local LA clubs and high schools—and grew up playing polo in nearby Eagle Rock. Hiring homegrown coaches has been a recent focus of Oxy polo; both Cox and Stabenfeldt are former Tigers. 

No matter where she’s from. Garcia has been a revelation for Occidental, but she’s not alone. Allison-Prokhin and Diacono are proving on a daily basis that women can and as well as men in the rough and tumble world of water polo.