In California, water polo is a very popular and highly competitive sport, games are high energy and cut throat, and attendance and knowledge of the sport is high. In suburban Illinois, water polo is an under appreciated and largely mysterious sport to most students and parents alike.

At Palatine High School, the overall trend of participating students in the sport has been slowly decreasing as the years pass by. I believe this is partly due to the lack of information given to students. Most other sports in the school are highly advertised and already known to student athletes. They know how to play football, or which bases to run to, or how many points for a basket.

Water polo on the other hand, may not even be a known sport until the child enters high school. There is a heavy misinterpretation about how it’s played, or even where. Water polo is played in a pool with each team consisting of 6 field players and one goalie. The objective of the game is to score a goal by throwing the ball into the opposing team’s net, fairly simple.

However, attendance for the games is pitifully low every year, even when the team is good. In 2014 Palatine’s boys team won Sectionals and even made it to state, but still went under the radar of the student body. This year the football team went to state and lost, but we’re still given a large pep assembly to recognize and honor the team.

I believe that if students were introduced to the sport freshman year during the swim unit, attendance for the sport, or even only the games, would begin to increase again, as students became more knowledgeable about it and felt comfortable.

Some staff may feel differently, thinking that it would be a waste of time, or that water polo is a useless or unimportant sport. They might state there is not enough time in the curriculum to introduce that, or disregard as unnecessary.

However, this could be the sport dozens of uninvolved students need, it will help them interact with a new community, and give them unique skills not learned anywhere else. One of the major points of freshman gym class is to showcase some key aspects of the school that promote health. Being an aquatic sport, water polo encourages a healthy lifestyle and beneficial workouts.

Increasing school wide awareness of Water polo could increase attendance of the sport, and also benefit a large group of students who remained uninvolved in extra curricular activities.