Peruse the NESCAC website for a while, and one thing becomes increasingly clear: Not all of the varsity-level sports at Connecticut College have their own pages on the league’s site—varsity water polo and sailing, to name a few. Curious about this lack of representation, I asked one of the three captains from this year’s men’s team for clarification.
According to Connor Matzinger ’10, “the reason there is no section on the NESCAC sports website about water polo is because we are the only NESCAC school with a varsity level water polo team. The other schools in the NESCAC only have club teams, if they have one at all.”
Not only does our school have one of the few varsity-level sailing teams in the league, but we also boast the only Division III water polo team. After more investigative digging, I found that both the men’s and women’s teams belong to the Collegiate Water Polo Association (CWPA).
The Conn men’s team shares this league with teams from Harvard, MIT, Brown, Johns Hopkins and Princeton. It appears that the Ivy League, among several others, also lacks complete varsity participation when it comes to water polo. The women’s team competes against schools such as Grove City, Macalester and Wheaton College within their CWPA division.
While many NESCAC schools have club teams, Matzinger believes that “our program would flourish a lot more if we had some NESCAC competition; some of the club teams we have played are pretty decent.” There is little doubt in my mind that interest in the sport among the student body would grow if rivalry matchups with schools like Tufts, Amherst and Williams occurred not only on the field and the court, but also in the pool.
As it stands now, the complement of Division III water polo teams is admittedly quite random and scattered throughout the United States. I challenge our fellow NESCAC schools to make the effort to transition from the club to the varsity level. Water polo is an Olympic sport, and as such, I think it deserves more recognition (especially in the New England region) as a legitimate spectator sport.
The other sport that is not well-represented on the NESCAC website is sailing. This situation is more widely known on campus, since the athletics and admissions departments have both advertised our sailing teams as the only non-Division III teams on campus.
This is, of course, because most college sailing teams compete against each other in what is known as the Intercollegiate Sailing Association of North America. Conn is a member of the New England Intercollegiate Sailing Association (NEISA), which is a regional division of the ISANA. Currently, the coed sailing team is ranked tenth in the NEISA poll, and the women’s team is ranked seventh in NEISA and ninth in the /Sailing World/’s national Top 20 poll.
These impressive standings are a testament to both strong recruiting efforts and an experienced, successful head coach in Jeff Bresnahan, who has been at Conn for just over sixteen years.
Although these teams are all receiving considerably less attention around campus, they continue to perform well in tough divisions that sadly contain few NESCAC rivals. It is my hope that we will eventually see the NESCAC website forced to include water polo and sailing links on their website, but this can only occur if more schools take the plunge and begin varsity programs of their own.
