For Erika Bigbie, Cal Poly women’s club water polo president and driver, making the choice between academics and playing water polo was easy. She knew she loved water polo, but academics would be more beneficial in the long run. The same is true for Sarah Ur, her teammate, four-time National Club Collegiate Championship Most Valuable Player and whole set.
“Her and myself were getting looked at; she was getting recruited for Division I and Division II schools,” Bigbie said. “I wasn’t pushing it much because I’m like, ‘I’m not going to go to the Olympics for water polo, and I want a college experience.’”
Four years into their academic careers, they are now a part of one of the most successful club water polo teams in the nation. The team won four consecutive national championships, beginning in 2008 in the Collegiate Water Polo Association (CWPA).
These wins raise the question: Why isn’t such a successful team a NCAA varsity sport at Cal Poly?
Like Bigbie said, she and her teammates, including Ur, who will be a graduate student next year, share the feeling of academics being a priority and water polo being a hobby. However, the dedication put toward the women’s club water polo team proved to be more than just a hobby.
Two-and-a-half hours a night, five nights a week starting the first week of winter quarter until the end of spring quarter, Bigbie and her 29 teammates take over the Anderson Aquatics Center. This hard work doesn’t go unnoticed.
“We didn’t want that (NCAA) commitment, but we ended up with that commitment because, if we win, we have to keep winning,” Bigbie said. “In the water polo community, and in CWPA nationally, Cal Poly is the team to beat.”
And that team to beat is staying put. Josh Combs, the team’s head coach and member of the men’s club water polo team, said the rumors of Cal Poly moving up the collegiate ranks always accompany success. But they are just that — rumors.
“A lot of the girls have talked about their feelings toward Cal Poly, and every girl that plays for the team picked Cal Poly as an academic institution,” Combs said. “The girls are more able to pursue their careers and goals, and then come out and do something they love on their own.”
In fact, Combs said many of the players were contacted by varsity programs before choosing Cal Poly, they chose to pursue academics and play water polo as a hobby.
Combs said there is “no denying that a lot of these girls could compete at a varsity level.
“These girls work their butts off every day in practice,” Combs said. “We do this thing we call ‘quarters’ — it’s seven minutes of straight swimming sprints. And in the end, winning the title made it all worth it. We were definitely the best conditioned team.”
As Combs said, winning national championships makes the hard work worth it. However, as a club sport the team has more to worry about than just playing well.
The two largest downfalls to not being a varsity sport, supported by the athletic department, is the lack of a head coach to take care of the paperwork side of athletics and, more importantly, funding, Bigbie said.
“(Varsity athletics) gets their stuff handed to them on almost a silver platter — that’s why I was excited when (Associated Students Inc. president-elect Kiyana Tabrizi) won,” Bigbie said. “She came to talk to some club sports, and said she was a cheerleader who was required to travel to certain things, but they weren’t given the funds to do it — that’s a lot like club sports.”
Tabrizi said she understands funding is an issue for club sports because she was a former participant of the stunt team, which she also said does not receive adequate funding throughout the year,. However, as of right now, there is nothing she can promise for an increase of funding next year.
“Funding is really tough when it comes to club sports,” she said. “As it is now, we help them as much as we financially can by giving them a large sum of money (in the beginning of the year). (ASI is) exploring a couple of ways to see if we can improve funding, but for now, it’s just the one large sum.”
The team can either stay at the club level and receive the funding ASI provides, which results in $3,500 a year, Bigbie said — or the team can start the process of becoming a varsity sport. The latter, however, isn’t something athletics director Don Oberhelman said is possible right now.
“I’ve had no conversations with anybody in club sports about elevating any of the programs to varsity status,” he said. “And with how our budget is, it’s not really an option for us here in the short term to add another varsity sport.”
Oberhelman said adding another varsity sport would require funding for a head coach, dues and at least 12 scholarships, among other costs. He estimated the scholarships alone would cost more than $100,000.
The only times he has personally seen a club sport rise to varsity status was at Texas A&M and SDSU — both of which had to do with Title IX issues. Basically, the amount of male and female athletes was not proportionately represented in the athletics department, so a team needed to be put on a varsity sport level to make both genders’ representations equal.
“I’ve heard they are really, really good, but we are happy where we are right now, and it sounds like they are happy where they are too,” Oberhleman said.
Oberhelman did not dismiss the idea entirely, though. Leaving the door slightly open to a varsity level might prove to be a good thing for younger players, such as sophomore driver Jordan Bell, who said she isn’t sure if she would want women’s water polo to become a varsity level sport.
One thing Bell did stress is club sports should receive more recognition.
“A lot of people don’t understand club sports — it’s kind of a different world,” Bell said. “With a team that has to be so self-motivated, we are expected to have perfect attendance to practice, and everyone to be there every night whether or not you play or travel — there is a lot of heart behind it because we are so self-motivated.”