Asphalt Green’s David Rodriguez Has High Hopes for Water Polo Growth in NYC
On Wednesday night, history will be made at Asphalt Green (AG) on New York City’s Upper East Side. Two professional water polo clubs—Italy’s Pro Recco, whose 11 Champions League titles make it the world’s best, and Ferencvaros of Hungary, winner of the last two Champions League titles—will face American college teams, the first time such matches have ever taken place in The Big Apple.
On Thursday night, Pro Recco and Ferencvaros will face off in a friendly match.
That this should happen in the city’s premiere aquatic facility is as it should be. Ever since the venerable swimming and fitness center opened its doors in 1984, AG has been the go-to location for New York City’s best swimming.
When UCLA, currently the top squad in the Collegiate Water Polo Association (CWPA) Men’s varsity poll, faces Pro Recco, the stands will be packed with polo fans from around the region. The nightcap features Princeton, the Garden State’s prized polo squad, playing Ferencvaros, whose squad has never been to NYC, unlike their Italian rivals who in 2002 played an exhibition against the U.S. men’s national team. That was the last time a water polo event of any magnitude occurred in the country’s media capital.
Courtesy: Asphalt Green
It’s no coincidence that at this moment David Rodriguez, longest-tenured head swim coach in AG’s history, is thinking big about polo. When Pro Recco owners Philip Hammarskjold and Alex Behring dreamed a year ago of a splash for their newly acquired club, they thought of NYC. Which brought them to Rodriguez and AG’s plans to make polo more than something locals think about at Olympic times—or once every four years.
Following is an abbreviated version of a recent interview with David Rodriguez. For the full text, please click on this link.
AG has an opportunity with water polo—next week Pro Recco and Ferencvaros will play one of the highest profile polo matches in NYC history. There’s often a split between swim people and water polo people. As the aquatic director, you oversee two different programs with natural rivalries.
Having an elite swim program and elite water polo program under the same umbrella is another piece we’re trying to achieve. My background is as competitive swimmer; through and through that was my passion. But I was exposed to water polo and played water polo throughout my high school career with some really great water polo coaches—and grew a lot of fandom for the sport itself and working together being a useful tool for kids to parlay into their professional lives.
Through careful leadership [AG polo] has evolved into a respectable program. What if we were to put our foot on the gas and try to become an elite program?
The combination of our coaches, my competitive nature and AG’s focus on the sports fitness and play for all we’ve decided to put our foot on the gas and see if we can get a water polo program that can hold up to what we’ve done from a swimming perspective.
There’re many competing forces, AG, a nonprofit with a very clear mission, to get as many people as possible in the water. On the flip side is AG’s many different constituencies—and now you are considering expanding water polo—and what that means to pool usage and your clientele.
I say it a little bit tongue in cheek, but the reality is that if you ask each of the constituencies, they’d all be mad at me and all be wanting more.
And I think that that’s when the lens that we use on all of this is through our mission… the concept of sports, fitness and play for all.
How do we chop it up? That’s a challenge! For our competitive team, we all must make compromises on pool time. Our water polo program, if they had more pool time would be better.
One of the blessings in disguise of all this is that our athletes on AGUA and ultimately water polo learn that [aquatics] is about something so much bigger than just their competitive teams. And the ability to provide access and to give opportunities that they have is at the core of what we’re teaching the kids. We’re teaching the kids to be advocates and better citizens and do things when they leave our program.
One of our athletes, Ali Wright, recently took the initiative and raised over $70,000 by herself to support our community programs. If we keep everything separate—only competitive teams here in this pool or community swimmers, there—they’d never see that.
I don’t think we perfected it, but I think that we found a good balance between having everybody cheerlead all the things that we’re doing [while] giving everybody what they need.
To finish up, there are rumors out there that AG wants more water, that if you could find the land, you’d build another facility.
We look at this in two ways. It’s not only expansion, but also maintenance and preservation of our current landscape as well, which is the two sides of the coin. Right now, we shut down both of our pools for two weeks to refurb/rehab, do all those things to continue to deliver [program] at a high level at our home site. We helped rehab the pool at River East which hadn’t been open since 2015. It’s not only building on our campus, but also looking for [aquatic] assets sprinkled across the city—that could potentially work for us and what we’re trying to do.
We’re doing due diligence on our research and seeing what’s possible on our campuses. We know we are bursting at the seams looking for more pool space and water. If there’s an opportunity that makes sense for the organization, I’m confident that we’ll jump on it.
Michael Randazzo (the Man with a Hat) is a swimming & water polo enthusiast in New York City. He’s the executive director of Inclusive Community Wellness, a Brooklyn-based NPO that provides health and wellness opportunities to New Yorkers. When he’s not on a pool deck helping children and adults learn to swim, Randazzo occasionally writes about water polo, a sport he never played and barely understands.
