Why I quit water polo

I’ve spent most of my life in and around the water. Pools were my happy place. I started competitive swimming at the age of eight and fell in love with the feelings both the water and the success had given me.

I had many first place finishes and fast dropping times on my club team, but soon after starting competitive swimming in high school I quickly realized how behind I was in comparison to the other swimmers. I stopped seeing success and it hurt. My times dropped from meet to meet but so did everyone else’s and I continuously ended up in the same place every time. My love for the sport was fizzling, until one of my best friends from freshman year convinced me to try out for water polo.

I had never heard of the sport, but it was something that gave me the opportunity to learn and improve. I quickly fell deeper in love with the sport, more than I had ever loved straight swimming. I became obsessed with it. My team was very much a foundational team, but with a team made up of primarily freshman we knew sooner or later we’d grow to be unstoppable. And we did.

My freshman year my team went completely defeated. Not one win. Serval close games, but never a win.

These defeats didn’t stop me or my team. I have never been more driven in my life than at the end of my freshman year. I had gone from playing ten seconds in my first game to being a starter for the last half of the season. I started thinking ‘maybe if I worked hard enough I can make something out of this.’

That summer me, my best friend, and other members of our team spent our summer training in and out of the pool daily. I had a great relationship with my coaches and really saw a future in the sport. At one point, I even thought maybe someday I might have the chance to play in college.

But that’s just it: I started thinking about college and a future and what I really wanted to do in life. Could I really make this a thing or should I put my energy somewhere else? At the time people kept enforcing the idea you have to be super involved if you want to get into college.

I starting looking for outlets to be a writer, so I joined the newspaper staff. I always loved theater, so I joined drama club. And now I’m ironically a Media/Communications major as well as a Theater major.

My time in the pool was now divided in thirds, but my heart was still deeply submerged in water polo. I tried my best to balance all three, but it got hard at times. My coach never verbally said it, but I always knew he wanted to tell me how much potential I wasted by not devoting my time strictly to water polo. My desire to prove him and everyone else that I could do it really tore me apart sometimes.

Me and several of my teammates spent our school breaks going to training camps with Olympians or at top college programs. Our team had quickly gone from completely defeated to district runner ups in just one year. No one saw it coming, and I can still remember my coach stopping us during half time to make us look at the crowd. He told us: “Not one person in those stands thought that we’d be here today and they definitely never thought that we’d be up at this point.” He was right.

My life was still crazy throughout high school. I got anxious and tired because I wanted to please everyone in every aspect of my life. Much of my personal animosity came from the fact I didn’t think any friend, teammate, or coach understood how serious I was about anything. I was putting in one hundred and ten percent in each field, but I understand it didn’t always seem that way when I’d give up practice time for a rehearsal. I gave up chances to excel in one field to simply be a part of every field.

By my senior year of high school, everything had changed. Senior year was the year I stopped swimming competitively, and instead switched my training schedule just enough so I could stay in shape for water polo season. This changed my relationship with my team and coaches.

I felt a lot of animosity and really felt like no one understood the sacrifices I was making in my life for them. I knew how much potential my team had and I knew I was going to try my best to be a part of it. I wanted nothing more than to finally make our school proud and show every other school in the conference we were nothing to take lightly.

But at the same time, I couldn’t help but focus on my future and I was pretty sure water polo wasn’t in the mix.

My senior year was hands down the best and worst year of water polo. I was exhausted. I was working ten times harder than anyone knew because I was trying to make up for the slack I missed in the fall. I was competing against some pretty amazing underclassmen for my spot in the pool and I wasn’t performing to the same level as my pervious stats had shown.

I was making dumb mistakes, my coach was yelling at me for them, and I couldn’t help but get so overwhelmed because there was so much going on. My team was winning, but where was my part in it? Life and water polo weren’t adding up.

That year we ended undefeated in our regular season. We put our school on the map throughout the state as a forced to be reckoned with. I have never felt so much love and exhaust from one group of girls in my life. We may have fought all the time, but we were a team who knew each others ins and outs so well — we were a powerful unit.

Sadly, our team never made it to States. We lost in the biggest upset of our entire career and we cried together. I can still picture the look on my teammates face the second we realized it was all over. I looked to my best friends and teammates and cried for all we had accomplished and for those things we never had.

I would never say losing that game was a relief, but in a way it was. I had another major commitment I need to fulfill the same weekend had we moved on to the next round. I had spent most of the week not focusing on the game but rather focusing on how I was going to be in two places at once.

Losing that game was the most relieving stop sign I had ever approached in my life. I overworked myself in high school, and I admit that. I decided that when I came to college, I was going to slow down.

After starting college I couldn’t help but feel like I wasn’t myself. I had nothing to go home to and say “well at least I have my team.” Those girls and that pool were my backbone throughout some of the toughest times in high school and now they weren’t here for me in college.

I’ve spent a lot of my time freshman year figuring out who I am and who I want to be. It has been really different because instead of putting my energy to improving my swim times, I’m spending my time improving me.

I miss my team, I miss my tan, and I miss the water. But I am happy.

I learned who I was in the pool, now I have to figure myself out on land.