Cramer’s Corner: The Unfound Sport

One of the most entertaining sports to watch at our school is sadly one of the most underrated. Both the girls and boys water polo programs have proved year after year that they are some of the strongest competitors in our league and deserve much more respect from the student body.

If you were to go to one of the games, you would see a couple of students in the stands, surrounded by mostly parents. Some students mock our team, saying that the players are too cocky and play a sport that nobody really cares about. We’ve all seen the guys walking around with their shades, their bleached out hair that they’re “too lazy to comb,” their dude-bro way of talking to one another and their thoughts that “there is no way anybody can deserve this kind of self-given respect.”

To be honest, some of them are too cocky. It is as if some of these players are living the lifestyle of what they think a water polo player should live, acting how they are expected to act. These types players need to realize that they swim in water, not walk on it.

Up until this year, I had my doubts about the legitimacy of the sport. It wasn’t until I watched the boys water polo game against Los Gatos that I became hooked.

While some sports can be slow and even tedious at points (yes, even baseball can get a little boring at times), water polo never has a dull moment. With the constant display of effort that it takes to rush from one side of the pool to another, along with an occasional fight, it’s hard for a spectator not to get into the game.

Maybe these players do have something to brag about. It was obvious in the first few minutes of being there who the real players were and who the posers were. It’s impossible to hide in the pool because there’s nowhere to go. You can either play, or you can’t.

I stared into the pool as I watched limbs flying everywhere. And then, before I knew what was happening, senior Alex Bailey picked up the ball and scored, throwing at what seemed like a hundred miles an hour with his belly button out of the water.
If I had been amazed by this sport’s complexity in the first few minutes of watching it, why hadn’t people picked up on watching it? People should be able to put aside their dislike of some and watch the beauty of the sport. If the jerk who rides around on his long board can’t play, chances are he knows it and so does everybody else in the pool. But there are real players out there who deserve the respect of our student body, and those are the players that we need to get behind.