Three years ago, women who wanted to play competitive water polo at Washington University were pretty much out of luck. That is, until Rachel Kriwinsky and Carolyn McKenzie came along. The tag-team formed a women’s water polo team as freshmen, and now play on that team along with thirteen other women.

“They [used to have] a men’s team, and few women played with the men,” said Kriwinsky. “When I came here, there were about six girls who wanted to start a team, so we did.”

This weekend, the team will travel to Ohio University to compete in its first tournament of the season. The team will compete against Ohio University, Bowling Green University, and Miami University’s ‘A’ and ‘B’ teams.

“We’re really excited about the tournament,” said Kriwinsky. “We’ve improved a lot since last year, and we’re hoping for second or third place.”

Three starters will not be participating this season because they are abroad, with McKenzie being one of them. While this could be a setback, the team remains confident about the upcoming season.

The team is fairly new to competitions. In its first year, the team was not allowed to compete because of league rules. Last year was the team’s first year of competition, and it finished seventh out of the 10 teams in the league. The team has three tournaments scheduled for this season, and may add a fourth.

Nigel Davies, a senior and member of the men’s water polo team, coaches the relatively young team, of which about half are freshmen.

“It’s starting to pick up, and more people are hearing about the water polo team,” said Kriwinsky. “Now that we have a team, more high school players are motivated to come here and play.”

Kriwinsky says a handful of ex-swimmers (many of whom don’t want to wake up early for swim practice) have joined the team.

“We have some really good new people this year,” said Kriwinsky. “They’re great athletes, but most of all they’re a lot of fun.”

The team did not practice much during the first semester because a lack of pool time. This semester, though, the women practice Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays and they also swim twice a week.

While their practice schedule is not as demanding as those of varsity teams, the women still train hard and their high level of competition reflects their efforts. WU is the only Division III water polo team in the Mid-West Division, which contains nine Division I schools.

Later this season, the women will compete against Notre Dame, the team that won the national championship last year.

The women are excited about competing in a new Division III Nationals Conference that will be instituted next year.

“We’ll have the chance to go to nationals for Division III,” said Krawinsky.

Additionally, they are keeping their fingers crossed in hopes of hosting a tournament next year-quite an accomplishment for a team that has only been around for three years.

Popularity: 1% [?]

 Print This Post

This entry was posted on Friday, February 14th, 2003 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.