I was a swimmer in my school days, but Capricorn High School, where I matriculated, had a shallow pool. So it wasn’t until I got to the Army Gimnasium in Heidelberg to do compulsory military service that I was exposed to the game of water polo.
The camp was located on what used to be the Normal College - teachers training colleges, bizarrely, used to be called that those days - so it had a water polo pool and a team that played in the Easterns league.
It was the start of what was to become a lifetime sporting love for me. I played, coached, refereed and administered the game for 25-odd years and, when that all went away, I used my current job as an excuse to hang around the pool when there was a game in progress as often as I could.
So, two weeks ago, on the coldest spring day in recent history, I was taking pictures at Roedean where the Old Mutual tournament was on the go; and I was inordinately excited to see on Facebook the Clifton tournament was on last weekend.
That’s always the start of the season, and thankfully it’s happening in Durban where the weather’s better than here. (Roedean’s pool is heated, by the way).
Water polo is as good a sport to be part of the educational process as any, I guess. But it also reflects much that is wrong with our sporting set-up, and with schooling and society in general.
The value of sport in education, I’ve always been on about, lies in learning how to handle winning and losing. It’s clearly wrong to say that winning isn’t important, but if you lose - and you are going to, for sure - then how you handle it reveals your character. The same goes for winning.
Any team game can teach you those lessons. What makes water polo unique is the sheer physical difficulty of playing it properly. I never got that right, of course, but I’ve been around enough teams and coaches to know that water polo players train harder, and longer, than anyone else in school sport.
That adds an extra dimension to winning and losing - you cannot succeed unless you put in the hours and, at the same time, you may end up losing even though you have worked long and hard.
How’s that for a life lesson?
And water polo is the sort of game that requires team work to the extent that just about no other does. With the limited mobility that goes with battling to keep from drowning while warding off the attentions of an aggressive defender, you have to look for someone to give the ball to. There’s not much room for individual stars there - although the most talented players will always make a difference.
The coaching and tactics revolve around a central thing - move the ball around until someone is in a position to take a shot at goal. And, prevent opponents from doing that when they have possession, of course.
That’s a bit like life, isn’t it?
More importantly, perhaps, it’s fun. Out in the sunshine, in the water on a hot day, with other young people who think like you. That’s why the game is so huge at school level, threatening the continued popularity of established summer codes like cricket.
And the girls have really taken to it -it’s the fastest growing sport at the girls’ schools, I’m told.
The downside is that it’s an elite sport. It needs a deep swimming pool of a certain size, which immediately makes it for the well-resourced schools only. The game is struggling with transformation. You have to be a swimmer of well above average ability to play it, and beginners run the real risk of drowning, so mass-participation is out.
Still, I’m glad I went down to see what all that whistle-blowing was all about at the Army Gim in Heidelberg all those years ago.
Water polo has added much to my life down the years, and the 2016/7 season, thankfully, is up and running now.
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