After her first water polo practice, Alex Zuckerman thought she’d never come back.

When she came to Syracuse University, she knew she wanted get involved with a sport. She saw the water polo table at the club fair, which harkened back to her competitive swimming days. The people manning the table assured Zuckerman that she could hold her own with the rest of the club if she had swam in high school.

‘I went to the first practice and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m never doing this again. I can’t keep up,” said Zuckerman, now a senior broadcast journalism major.

Zuckerman decided to stick with it, and now finds herself the acting president of both the men’s and women’s water polo clubs.

Members of SU’s women’s water polo club are nothing short of athletes. In just a couple of practices with them, you’ll see why. The physically challenging training may bring some to consider throwing in the towel, but the camaraderie and intense competition make people stay.

Water polo, a wetter hybrid of soccer and basketball, is pretty basic. But things get tricky when players are not allowed to touch the bottom of the pool. Basically, they’re stuck treading water for seven-minute quarters.

With a limited introduction, new members are told to get in the pool and see how well they can keep up. Zuckerman said most new members played water polo or swam competitively in high school, but many newcomers arrive with the ability to swim one lap around the pool.’We say, ‘Alright, jump in. See if you can swim ten.”

Melanie Gauchy, a graduate student in the French program, showed up to her first water polo experience Sept. 13. She had only swam in junior high and admitted it was never as intense as those practices. 

‘I just chatted with my friends in the pool and swam a little bit,’ she said. ‘(Water polo) looks fun. Kind of brutal, and there are lots of possibilities to drown, but fun.’

For someone who relies on the doggie paddle, practices can be daunting. Swimming from one side of Webster Pool to the other is just 25 meters. Sounds easy enough. Swim 200 meters with your head down. When you’re done with that, do another 100, but just kick your legs. Getting tired yet? Try another 100 meters of sprints. 

Now who wants to play some water polo? Nope, there’s still some work to do. 

Next is tossing practice. The water polo ball is like a volleyball, but yellow and much harder. For those with small hands, there’s a hitch: You can’t use two hands to toss or catch the ball. You can only use one. This made practice really interesting. I can palm a baseball, and that’s about it. 

Then there’s an actual game. Don’t be scared if there are coed practices: It’s common. With separate male and female water polo clubs training in the same space, it gets crowded in that pool. But it’s for the best, since the clubs play each other in practice. It doesn’t hurt to see members of the opposite sex in skintight bathing suits, either.

The guys will put the game in front of gentlemanly airs, at first. They think like dogs: Ball? Oh, a ball! Mine! And then they’ll realize they bulldozed a 120-pound girl to get to it.

‘At a scrimmage, one guy literally ducked me under water and kept me there,’ Zuckerman said. ‘But then he pulled me up after he threw the ball.’

Contact is what’s best about the sport. It brings out primal instincts in even the most timid players. With only one final goal in mind, fighting your way to that yellow ball is like hunting in the woods for wild boar. Only less bloody.

A member of the water polo club for three years, junior social work major Micaela Scully has picked up some tips and tricks. She said girls need to cut their nails to a certain length for a game so they don’t scratch up opponents too much. Some things, as always, find their way through the cracks.

‘One of the girls forgot to clip her toenails, and my friend got cut pretty badly on her leg,’ Scully said. ‘There’s intense contact.’

The water polo club prides itself on the casual attitudes other club sports tend to forgo. No need to be intimidated with all club sports. In this sense, water polo on campus is perfect for anyone wanting to keep in shape without the threat of roster cuts. Plus, it’s just plain fun.

‘We’re really intense, but we’re fun,’ Zuckerman said. ‘We don’t cut people like other clubs. We just want people to enjoy themselves.’

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Published on September 20, 2010 at 12:00 pm