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Brown newest intramural sport, water polo, is gaining excitement and momentum across campus as the number of fans grows exponentially from match to match. While many students now play, the league's growth and creation can in fact be traced to one man - team captain Jeremy Rockingham '10.
"I guess the idea came to me one hot August morning," Rockingham recalls. "As my friends and I were warming up the horses for our daily polo game, I said to myself, gee, it's almost too hot to play. And that's when it occurred to me: Water polo. Polo you can play in the water? That's brilliant!"
In Rockingham's first attempted game that summer all six participating horses drowned. "It was tragic," said Rockingham. "But then I realized, how does it even make sense to have mallets? It's not like you can even hit a ball that's underwater, you know? Man, was that stupid."
Once he got back to Brown, Rockingham focused on getting a team together. Upon learning there already was a varsity water polo team, Rockingham attended a game, but what he saw repelled him. "Oh my god, they had it all wrong!" Rockingham chuckled. "That's not even close to what it looked like in my head."
Rockingham then proceeded to put together an intramural team, and ambitiously scheduled its first practice for the late winter. That maiden voyage was not without its setbacks.
"Sure, I was the guy that almost drowned," Matt Vanderheim '12 told the Noser. When asked what led him to sign up, Vanderheim said, "I had no idea what water polo was, so I wanted to give it a little try-zees."
According to Vanderheim, "I guess I just assumed I'd know how to handle the ball. And stay afloat."
Luckily, a teammate fished Vanderheim out of the water before it was too late, and practice resumed. Vanderheim insists that the day taught him a valuable lesson.
"Jesus Christ, am I over trying things just because I don't know what they are," Vanderheim said."That was almost as bad as when they called on me at the first M-Sex meeting and I said sodomy is a sin in the eyes of God."
For the second practice, Rockingham hired an instructor.
"She told me she had been in the Olympics," Rockingham said, "so what's better than that? She had us get rid of the ball and goal, which just shows what that goofy varsity team knows. And instead of telling us how to keep score, she made us hire a panel of judges! What an awesome sport!"
The first match enjoyed a particularly small audience, but among those in attendance was Rita Bullwinkel '11, a member of Brown's varsity women's water polo team. "I mean, I have to hand it to them, they are pretty good," Bullwinkel said, watching Rockingham's teammates raise him above the water. "It's just that I'm pretty sure this sport is called synchronized swimming."
