St. Mary’s Academy recently held a typical letter of intent signing ceremony. Typical, that is, until Colorado State water polo signee Kailin Custy broke out a video of her Colorado Pirates club team.
“I wanted to teach people what water polo is,” Custy said. “I didn’t want everyone to be completely clueless about me going away to play a sport, and they didn’t know what water polo is.”
She might want to bring the video for freshman orientation in Fort Collins, where women’s water polo, having just wrapped up its second season, is a little-known and even less understood sport.
Welcome to the world of “emerging” women’s sports. While men’s collegiate sports programs are being trimmed for budgetary reasons – such as tennis at Colorado – women’s sports are added as universities keep pace with Title IX compliance.
Athletic directors are looking to fulfill complicated compliance formulas, involving everything from scholarships and “proportionality” mirroring the male-female student enrollment ratio, at a minimum of cost. All Division I schools must sponsor at least 16 sports and a minimum of six for men and women.
“A lot of people don’t know we have a team,” said CSU’s Annie Quinn, a sophomore from Salt Lake City, where water polo is a popular high school club program. Freshman Monica Schuh, who grew up in California’s water polo culture, said, “My friends here don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t think a lot of people realize CSU has a water polo team.”
Adding to the anonymity, she said, is that CSU competes in the all-California Western Water Polo Association instead of the Mountain West Conference, as it does in other sports.
When the NCAA mandated Division I football schools offer 16 sports, Colorado State announced the addition of water polo in 2003 as the 16th sport.
Shari Worack, then a Grandview High School senior, was considering enrolling at CSU the day the decision was announced. She deemed it fate.
A swimmer who had played water polo only six months with the Pirates, she said, “It definitely influenced my decision to go there.” She started as a freshman walk-on and has played well enough to get a partial scholarship next year as a junior.
“It shows this really does happen. You play a sport six months and then you compete at the Division I level,” said Pirates founder and coach Grier Laughlin.
Soccer not best bet
There are those who thought former CSU athletic director Mark Driscoll went off the deep end when he added water polo, believing soccer was the natural choice. CSU is the only MWC school not to offer soccer, and the sport is second only to basketball in girls participation in Colorado high schools.
But adding water polo was much cheaper, coach John Mattos said. It cost CSU less than $100,000 as an initial investment while soccer would have been much higher, Mattos said. The team’s budget is now about $35,000 for travel, pool rental and equipment, exclusive of paid staff.
Although a maximum of eight scholarships are permitted in water polo, CSU started with three and increases to five next season. Scholarships are split among several players, similar to what most schools do in track and softball.
Mattos, who has bled chlorinated green and gold as CSU’s swim coach for 26 years, offered to add water polo to his duties. He lobbied for the sport, saying it wouldn’t infringe on intramural playing fields or crowd existing locker rooms.
And, most critical for budget-conscious CSU, it involved a small commitment of scholarships.
“It was not well received by a lot of people,” Mattos said. “Now people are saying, ‘Hey, this is pretty cool,’ and coming out to our games.”
The Rams finished 17-21 this past season.
CSU is far from alone in adding otherwise unusual sports in order to fulfill legal requirements. Sports that feature large rosters, such as rowing (an average of 60 participants), soccer (a 25-player average) or equestrian (45) became instant Title IX cures for some universities.
Former CSU athletic director Tim Weiser first studied the issue before his 2001 departure. He was amused by the suggestion CSU could launch a rowboat in Horsetooth Reservoir. He then left for Kansas State and added rowing and equestrian.
Moving money around
Then there is Nebraska, which added women’s bowling, an outgrowth of a club sport that the NCAA sanctioned starting in 2003-04. Cornhuskers keglers have won two NCAA titles.
“More and more schools need to find a way to comply with the law, whether it’s to demonstrate continuing expansion of a program or the proportionality of the institution,” said Missouri State senior women’s administrator Darlene Bailey, chair of the NCAA committee on Women in Athletics.
And, yes, she has heard the blame heaped on Title IX for cutbacks in men’s programs.
“It’s a matter of institutional choice whether to cut any sport,” Bailey said. “If a cut is budget-based because of limited resources, the pie is only so big and the choice is how to cut the pie.”
Rather than eliminate programs, Bailey points to the rapid escalation of football and men’s basketball budgets and asks why schools don’t move some of that money over to save nonrevenue men’s sports programs.
As for CSU, Mattos said the water polo program has exceeded his expectations. And he has found it easier to recruit for water polo than swimming because “there are not as many opportunities for those kids.”
Staff writer Natalie Meisler can be reached at 303-820-1295 or nmeisler@denverpost.com.
