The Nexus

Jessica Chang
Brianne Sheehy (12) guards Jae Crabtree (11) with her hands above water as Crabtree grapples to complete a turn move and get past the defense. The move, and other rough underwater tactics, plays a big role in the sport.

Above the water, it looked like it could’ve just been fatigue.

Brianne Sheehy’s (12) face contorted with pain, her legs kicking furiously to try to escape from her defender and keep moving the ball forward. But her defender squeezed her side to keep her from moving. Sheehy could feel the pain and a bruise forming. But no referee would see under the water. No foul would get called. Sheehy passed the ball up and continued playing.

An hour later, she stepped out of the pool. A raised bruise mark in the shape of a hand stood out from her side. It lasted for more than two days.

“I just thought, ‘Wow, that was over the top,’” she said.

Over the top, but not out of the ordinary. In every water polo game, bruises, scratches and worse are bound to happen. Players have come to accept the underwater violence. They understand no referee can see these attacks, and most players have learned that yelling for a foul accomplishes little. They almost always happen underwater.

Girls water polo coach Amy Jennings said that, in reality, it’s often the girl who retaliates on an underwater foul who gets an ejection, a 20-second removal from the game that gives opponents an extra player.

“It’s the girl that gets frustrated and can’t handle it who the ref sees,” she said. “Trying to prepare for that, all I can do is [say], ‘Don’t get so wrapped up in, ‘This girl’s holding me or scratching me.’ Keep playing the game we want to play.’”

Sometimes, this means ignoring a serious foul just to keep the game going. Aubrie Fowler (12) said that the most memorable rough play she’s seen in a game was a bite-mark last year on teammate Sarah Rosenthal (’08).

“She was more frustrated about [the bite] than it being painful,” Fowler said. “[She] wanted to tell the ref, but she just toughed it out and said it wasn’t worth it. She had a bruise for a couple of days.”

However, Fowler said that big injuries like Sheehy’s and Rosenthal’s are relatively rare.

Instead the game involves underwater kicking, sometimes as a strategic move to “push off” and move faster through the water, and holding. In some situations, the hold is a defender keeping an offensive player from moving.

In other situations, such as a turn move, an offensive player wraps her arm around the defender and forces her out of the way to gain position. In both cases, the players try to gain advantage by what they do under the surface.

Jennings said that these moves are not just slightly dirty tactics. They’re key parts of the game that the team practices often.

“That’s pretty much the whole game,” she said. “All the other teams are doing the same moves, and if we don’t know how to do it or play defense against it, then we’re definitely not going to do as well.”

Besides questionable moves, both Sheehy and Fowler said that fouls play a huge part in the game, and not just in avoiding ejections and putting the team at a disadvantage. Water polo players attempt to draw fouls as in most other sports, but their strategies differ from taking a charge from a defender in basketball, or the shouting in soccer as players go down on slide tackles.

“If you put your shoulder into [the opponent] and let go of the ball, it can look like they’re holding onto you even if they’re not,” Fowler said. “You have to show the ref they’re being aggressive by being overly dramatic.”

The way a team uses these ejections to their advantage is often the key to the game. In fact, Fowler said that many of the goals Westview scores come when the other team is a player down because of an ejection.

But practicing both how to play aggressive defense and how to act out fouls on offense is a challenge. Practice scrimmages against teammates who are also friends make it difficult to simulate real game situations.

“It definitely has to happen in practice first,” Fowler said. “Our coach has had to tell us, ‘You guys have to go 100 percent on each other. You can’t cut each other any breaks just because you’re afraid of hurting them.’”

The aggressive tactics needed to play water polo were tough for Sheehy to learn, at first. She said that the full contact in the sport, both above and below the water, was something she needed to adjust to. Now, after years on varsity, she knows what it takes to play.

“When you’re in the game, you have to get in the mindset that, I’m going to do almost anything I can to get an advantage,” she said. “You have to turn that switch on, that, ‘I’m here to play the game and not to make friends.’”

And even if that means getting a few bruises and plenty of scratches, Sheehy said that it’s just part of her sport. The little injuries don’t bother her any more. In some way, she said they become more like battle scars.

“They’re like war wounds,” Sheehy said. “It adds another element to the game that separates water polo from other sports. You can do so much more and be so much more aggressive than any other sport I’ve ever played.”