While most Conn students are still well into a REM cycle by 6AM, many varsity fall athletes will have one or two morning workouts or a lift session per week. The men’s water polo team in particular has had three morning practices a week since they first arrived on campus the Sunday following freshmen move-in day. Beginning with three-a-day practices that first week, they now currently have eight two-hour sessions of practice weekly. CC men’s water polo has trained for roughly seventy hours in the past four weeks.
But how is this season any different from previous seasons?
For the past few years, the men’s team has been plagued with every form of bad luck one could imagine, including limited team size, injuries and even a broken team van window that occurred in Boston. While many other CC teams can and are allowed to recruit classes upwards of 5-7 people, both the men’s and women’s teams are lucky to cumulatively recruit two players a year. But despite all of the hardships and difficulties the team has faced, this year the future looks brighter.
Currently, CC men’s water polo is still a small fish in a very large pond, having played three teams this past weekend, two of which are ranked among the top twenty Division I teams in the country. Unlike any other team at Conn, the men’s team is not a member of the NESCAC league, but the northern conference of the Collegiate Water Polo Association (CWPA), in which five of the eight teams are Division I teams. But despite these challenges, a highly skilled recruiting class, in addition to an extremely intense and rigorous preseason, has given the program hope and an edge to improve by leaps and bounds this year. As a handful of former potential recruits who could not handle the preseason would tell you, this sport is not for the faint of heart.
So what does a normal men’s water polo player’s day consist of? Let me give you an example of what it’s like.
Your alarm goes off, blaring at 5:30 AM on a typical Tuesday. You drowsily open your eyes and see that the sky is still pitch black, wondering why you are up at such a godforsaken hour. You remind yourself that for every minute you’re late to practice, the team is forced to swim more laps as you reluctantly pull yourself out of bed to shut off your alarm.
Your body fails to respond to your brain the first time as everything hurts. With stiff knees, sore abs and probably wrecked shoulders, it becomes a mental challenge to just wake up in preparation for 6 AM morning practice. You get dressed and walk across the cold, dark campus to the AC bridge while your non-athlete friends are warm and snug under their comforters in bed.
As you come down and open the pool door, the unholy sound of a teammate’s blasting techno music makes sure you’re awake if the walk hasn’t done it for you. You groggily put on your cold, damp suit, grab your goggles and start off the morning with Ab Ripper from the infamous P90X workout program. Covered in sweat, you come back downstairs to Lott Natatorium and take a quick shower before jumping into the frigid pool. 500 yards, or twenty lengths, is a simple warm up followed by four lengths (100 yards) of treading with your hands out of the water.
After warm up, you’ll most likely do a heavy swim set that’ll test your stamina and speed. By the end of the morning swim practice, you could have swum anywhere from 2000-4000 yards—between 80-160 laps. You get out of the pool, exhaustedly shower and hopefully go back to campus to nap, but many have early classes at 8 or 9AM.
You come back down to the pool by 4 PM. Sore from the morning, you try and get some early stretches in, maybe use the elastic bands for your shoulders. Despite your protests, your teammate still refuses to turn off his repetitive techno as you eventually succumb to his desires, too tired to argue. You go to the locker room in efforts to repeat the morning procedure but find it more and more difficult as the prospect of putting on a cold, wet Speedo does not seem pleasant. You do so anyways with the team yelling at you to hurry up and eventually find yourself at the pool deck with seven other teammates pulling the pool’s ridiculously heavy bulkhead.
You get in for an easy 500 warm up again, similar to this morning. After the warm up, you are relieved to see Coach JJ throw in brightly colored water polo balls into the water and tell you to start passing. After 15-20 minutes or so of balls zipping through the air and a couple catching you in the back of the head, you do some light “shooting” on the wall of goalie Clayton Witter ’13, who was ranked 6th in the country in the number of saves his previous rookie season, who’ll easily shatter your confidence.
Shooting in water polo is an interesting concept. It requires the shooter to propel himself out of the water while treading with an “eggbeater” kick and then throwing a ball at the peak of your “jump”. Teammates like Sam Mitchell ’12 will make you wonder whether he has fins on underwater when he treads out waist-high as his Speedo is visible when he shoots. After some shooting, Coach JJ will blow his whistle to begin counter drills on the goal, requiring a player to sprint down the pool from a tread start while being chased by a teammate as he receives a ball and attempts to shoot on the goalie on a sprint. After going through this drill with a number of variations for about twenty times, it’s time to scrimmage.
Scrimmages, although considered the most “fun” part of practice, should not be taken lightly, or else JJ will not be too happy. At any moment, he can change the practice and force you to do jumping jacks in the water, which reminds you to work your ass off in the scrimmage. You’ll scrimmage to the point of exhaustion, sprinting up and down the pool after turnovers.
Lately, with so many injured players, JJ himself, the young 31 year-old coach (formerly a star of the 7-time national champion USC team), will jump in and play on one of the teams due to its inability to field a full scrimmage. He’ll dominate you and make it look easy while you wrestle with him just to stay afloat. After fifteen minutes of scrimmaging or so, you’ll do some six-on-five “man up” drills while in a state of exhaustion and then practice is over. Get out, do some stretching, set up the pool again and shower as you hungrily anticipate the fine dining services of Harris.
These daily events have become a ritual on the men’s team over the past couple of weeks. They reflect the dedication its members have in bringing Camel pride and making this year the most competitive and intense season the program has ever known. So next time you see Sean Hackett ’12 with bags of ice on his shoulder, or a limping Ryan Pelham ’12, or Sam Burns ’13 as you say hello and he responds with a grunt of exhaustion, be sure to give them all a pat on the back. Ask how they’re doing, do them a favor or come support them at their games this season. And be sure to come down for this year’s Men’s National Division III championships hosted by Conn during the weekend of October 23-24.
