Experience and versatility lead women's water polo to success

My budding adolescent social life was in peril, simply because I could not tread water.

Two months after my 16th birthday I still wasn't allowed to drive. I was stuck. My parents' rule was clear — no Eagle Scout, no driver's license. Only the swimming merit badge stood between me and a boy scout's highest honor. But unless I learned how to float — soon — I would be left in the back seat of a raucous car pool moping my way to school.

So, after a weekend spent watching women's water polo in action at DeNunzio Pool, my first question for freshman driver Danielle Carlson was clear.

Never mind her teenage years spent in the pool, swimming for her local club water polo team in California. Never mind Princeton's nationally ranked women's team, off to a promising 3-1 start to the 2004 season. And never mind Carlson's spectacular performance Sunday night, when she netted five goals as the Tigers scored the game's last 12 goals to wallop visiting George Washington, 13-3.

The first thing I wanted to know was "How do you tread water for so long?"

"Nobody asks a soccer player how they stand up for so long," Carlson replied. "It's natural. We've been doing it for so long that [swimming is] like walking for us."

Fair enough, I suppose, but take those hours spent keeping yourself afloat and then try kicking your legs hard enough to raise yourself high above the water, then firing the ball past defenders and a waiting goalie and into the back of the net. Oh, and do it all with a girl hanging from each arm. Water polo players are athletic anomalies, packaging strength, endurance, speed, and coordination together to perform each day. Take, for example, the eggbeater, the water polo term for the leg-kick that lifts your body far enough out of the water that you can pass and shoot uninhibited.

I have spent a lifetime struggling with sports that don't require me to be submerged, I realized. How could anyone be so comfortable in the water that they were free to focus on the game's finer points?

"It puts you out of your natural state, for sure," Carlson agreed. "The key is to make things natural, [and] the harder you work in practice, the less it hurts when you're out there playing."

These girls are no strangers to pain. That pain comes in different degrees, and at the team's daily early morning practices, as in a game, the worst pain comes near the very end.

For my high school basketball team, it was the line sprints. For lacrosse, it was the three-mile uphill race to the water tower. For Carlson and her teammates, it's what head coach Luis Nicolao calls "over and outs."

The drill is straightforward. As practice closes and swim sets, drills and scrimmages have all been completed, the team again toes the edge of the pool, its energy already spent. The Tigers plunge in, swimming lap after lap, pausing at the end to pull themselves entirely out of the water, standing on the edge only to turn and plunge in again.

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"You have to constantly be at your best," Carlson said. "The teams that win are those that can push hard at the end of the game, the ones that never give up."

So far the Tigers seem to be doing just that. Princeton was No. 19 in the country in the preseason polls, and with a poolful of young talent, that success won't ebb in years to come.

And the hardest part?

"Every morning, being at the pool by 6:30," Carlson confided, "the single hardest thing is just getting yourself back into the water for the first time."