College Team wants games

[minnpolo]

St. John's University of Collegeville, Mn is looking for games in the fall 2008 season. Check out our website, clubs.csbsju.edu/waterpolo to see when we're available.

We took 2nd in the Heartland Conference and 5th at DIII Nationals and are willing to play anyone and may be able to travel

[gilligan]

There are some senior teams and high-performance youth club teams in Winnipeg, but I have no idea how they'd compare in calibre to CWPA polo, or whether they'd be interested at all. Nobody else in Canada is really remotely close to that part of Minnesota.

You guys have the same problem as western Canada, with fairly big distances between centers. I used to live 12 miles from the US border, but there were no teams in North Dakota at all as far as I know, so it didn't help our club any. Seems to be sort of a dead zone for water polo.

[Torchbearer]

First of all, thanks, Minnpolo, for your personal email to me. I appreciate it. I was never involved with collegiate water polo, except briefly when starting the men's club team at the U. of Minnesota in the early 1960s. My playing and coaching always was with YMCA and AAU teams in Minnesota and then Iowa and Illinois and finally here in North Carolina. Our Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois teams played against Winnipeg regularly, both in our home pools and in Winnipeg. I took a team of YMCA boys from Illinois to Winnipeg in 1969. We played in the Pan-Am pool there, and our boys won all four games we played. The Winnipeg teams were good, but not great. However, as is almost always the case when dealing with the Canadians, their hospitality was Outstanding. If I were you, I'd gather my teammates together and pool our resources and fly as cheaply as possible out to California for a week of polo playing there against whatever teams you can find. In the 1970s, I had a team of middle-class girls here at the Asheville YMCA and we flew once yearly to the best competition we could find -- in Pennsylvania, Florida, the Midwest, the Southwest, and one year out to California and Hawaii, where our teen girls beat the No. 1 California and Hawaii women's teams in their own pools. In 1977, we flew to Montreal and Quebec City to play internationally against the Canadians, the Aussies, and the Dutch. Times have changed, and we no longer play ANY water polo in this area. I have become involved with whitewater racing, and this past weekend we had the U.S. Olympic Team Trials and Pan-Am Championships at the new $35M whitewater center in nearby Charlotte, North Carolina (http://www.usnwc.org and http://www.usack.org), with athletes from 13 countries competing. But if we were to revive water polo here, we'd certainly plan trips to Florida and California ASAP to play the best opponents we could find while providing some good educational opportunities along the way for our players. So ... I wish you much luck ...

[minnpolo]

Yep, we've begun looking into that. I've sent out e-mails to a lot of east coast teams I think are in our competition scale, it's just hard picking the right teams...too good and we get embarrassed and no one wants to do it again, too bad and it seems like a waste of our time.

[Torchbearer]

I would think your immediate goal would be to become the No. 1 team in your Heartland Conference. Therefore by playing the best competition you can find elsewhere, on the East and West coasts, win or lose, you would be progressing toward becoming the best in your area or conference or league. The YMCA kids teams I coached in the past took their lumps by playing against the best, but in so doing, they eventually became the best themselves. Isn't that the way it works? And of course, there's more than merely playing games when you travel. I always arranged for our Y kids to have some special educational experiences, from skin-diving in the Florida Keys to checking out the Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale to visiting Gettysburg National Park in Pennsylvania to riding the tram into the Sandia Mtns near Albuquerque to touring San Francisco to hiking in Yosemite National Park to picking pineapples on Oahu. And more. You know what? Nowadays, 30 years later, these same players remember the sight-seeing we did more than the scores of the games we played.

[Ron W]

Who do you play so far?

[minnpolo]

Our current season schedule has been announced on the CWPA website, http://www.collegiatewaterpolo.org/news ... 08Schedule

[Ron W]

It is interesting to look at your schedule. I used to play for a club in Minneapolis that was first called Pillsbury Waite and then Phillips after the school we practiced in and some called us Central. The only Minnesota school that I remember playing on your list was the University of Minnesota. We played St. Olaf but as far as I know Carleton didn't have a team. We played Hamline but Macalester didn't have a team. We had a student from Macalester on our team who I am sure would have played for them if they had had a team. We even played St. Cloud State but St. Johns didn't have a team.

UW Eau Claire used to sponsor a tournament that had several Wisconsin teams including Stout and River Falls and a couple of others.

There was a tournament in Winnipeg which we used to go to that was held at the Pan Am pool. It was a very nice tounament.

I hope you find some more places to play.

[minnpolo]

How long ago were you playing?

St. Olaf had a team a few years ago, but does not anymore. They never finished very good and i think the swim coach put a lot of pressure on them not to do it (or didn't allow swimmers to play). Hamline is always a "potential" team but nothing has ever gotten going. I've never heard of SCSU or Eau Claire having a team, though the swim coach at River Falls is a former polo coach/ref from California and has reffed a tournament we were in when no one else was available...with rules backdated about 5 years. Ron W, are you still in the MN/WI area?

[Ron W]

I played from about 1977 - 1985. Water polo has come and gone in most of those schools. For instance I can only remember playing SCSU maybe twice and they were one of those teams that didn't have anyone on the team who had ever been coached in water polo.

I live in southeastern Minnesota about half way between Rochester and Lacrosse, WI. I have heard rumors of teams in Rochester and Winona but haven't actually seen any evidence such as met someone who actually played, watched, or seen a schedule of a game.

The best bet for game of the possibilities I mentioned would be Winnipeg. They had a thriving program whch was partially supported by sponsoring Bingo and the tournament included teams from throughout Canada including some players who had played for the Canadian National team.

Our team also played a couple of times in a tournament in Nebraska, maybe the University of Nebraska? but I never was able to make that tournament.