Water Polo

FINA has Postponed the Women's Water Polo Olympic Games Qualification Tournament scheduled for Trieste in Italy from March 8-15 as a result of the coronavirus emergency. The event is the latest of many sports events around the world to be either postponed or cancelled altogether. The tournament has ...

In contrast to a blogosphere super-charged by statements yesterday from Dick Pound—a senior International Olympic Committee (IOC) member who suggested that the 2020 Tokyo Olympics may prove too dangerous to hold—Andrey Kryukov has provided Swimming World with an exclusive behind-the-scenes look into...

IRVINE, CA. The 2020 USC women’s water polo team made a grand statement this weekend, sweeping through the Barbara Kalbus Invitational at UC Irvine with four straight victories, including a 10-5 thrashing of Mountain Pacific Sports Federation (MPSF) rival and top seed the Stanford Cardinal in Sunday...

This is the Barbara Kalbus Invitational edition of the Collegiate Water Polo Association Top-25 poll. Swimming World includes final results from the just-completed tournament in UC Irvine. As the biggest non-conference tournament in the women’s season—with all of the nation’s top ten teams included ...

The UC Irvine Invitational was renamed The Barbara Kalbus Invitational in 2017 to honor Dr. Barbara Kalbus, who was seemingly at every important competition involving college or USA Water Polo events in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Kalbus—inducted in 1993 into the USA Water Polo Hall of Fame—worked tireles...

PRINCETON, NJ. The relationship between player and coach can be both rewarding and challenging. Establishing common ground is not always easy—especially when considering the outsized influence of a previous coach. And then, the player becomes a coach in their own right, and the impact of lessons lea...

Minnesota is not the first place that comes to mind when considering outstanding women's water polo programs. But one of country's best Division III programs is located at Macalester College, a small, liberal arts institution in St. Paul. The Scots have recently dominated competition in the ten-scho...

In years past, teams from the Collegiate Water Polo Association’s Division III conference—a collection of ten schools from the East and Midwest divided over two brackets—had no shot at a national championship. The best that Connecticut College, Grove City, Penn State Behrend, Utica, and Washington &...

Fears regarding the spread of the highly contagious novel coronavirus—now officially dubbed “2019 nCoV” or “Covid 19”—are proving nearly as potent as the disease itself. Those who have been gauging its growing impact can feel little surprise that the 2020 Asian Water Polo Championships, to have been...

LA JOLLA, CA. The Canyonview Aquatic Center at the University of California at San Diego is as perfect a venue for a big-time water polo tournament as any in America. The pristine facility has two 50 meter pools approximately 50 yards apart, conveniently separated by locker rooms and a climbing cent...

In what may appear to be a long time coming, Swimming World’s previews of the six conferences that will send teams to the 2020 NCAA Women’s Water Polo Tournament in early May are now live. Following are links to our 2020 conference previews. Winners are predicted by the various preseason polls voted...

Even without the lauch last year of a national DIII championship for men and women, the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference would still be the nation’s most intriguing conference for water polo. A federation of academically excellent colleges that dot the California landscape, th...

As the 2020 women's water polo season enters week four of competition, prepare for rankings in the latest Collegiate Water Polo Association Top 25 varsity poll to be scrambled. This is because the Triton Invitational—hosted by UC San Diego—is the first major women's tournament of the season. 16 team...

PROVIDENCE, RI. If you have not seen Wagner’s Sofia Diaz Alvarez play, you are missing one of the region’s best water polo players. Now a sophomore for the liberal arts school on New York City's Staten Island, the native of Madrid, Spain has emerged as the top attacker and defender on a Seahawk squa...

With a 9-8 win over Spain last month in the final of the 34th LEN European Water Polo Championship, the Hungarian men not only captured gold in front of their countrymen in Budapest's Duna Aréna, they qualified for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. [Hungarian Fans Ecstatic as Men Beat Spain 14-13 for 2020 Eu...

There’s one more shot to qualify for teams on the outside looking in of the 2020 Tokyo men’s water polo tournament. It will take place at the Zwemcentrum Rotterdam in the Netherlands second-largest city and one of the European Union’s economic centers. With possibly four spots available, as many as ...

PROVIDENCE, RI. The 2020 Bruno Women's Water Polo Classic last weekend was an opportunity to catch local teams in early season action at Brown's Kathryn Graham Aquatics Center, one of East's better facilities. Part of the tournament's draw was participation by Whittier and Claremont-Mudd-Scripps, me...

PROVIDENCE, RI. Starting a collegiate water polo program from scratch presents numerous obstacles, and the path to success is by no means assured. Case in point: in 2016, La Salle launched men’s and women’s polo at the same time, and it took three years and a new coach for the Explorers to find thei...

PROVIDENCE, RI. The Siena women's water polo program has historically dwelled among the lower rungs of the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC). Picked seventh of the conference's nine schools in the 2020 coaches preseason poll—just ahead of a rebuilding St. Francis Brooklyn and newcomer (to po...

PROVIDENCE, RI. Saturday at the Kathryn Graham Aquatics Center on the Brown University campus was a day of firsts for women's NCAA varsity water polo. Long Island University, primarily known for its decades-long success in men's basketball as the Blackbirds, played its first-ever women's polo match....