Water Polo in New York City

What’s a tiny commuter college from Brooklyn doing competing with the powerhouse California universities for the national championship in water polo?

We asked that of St. Francis College (enrollment of 2,511 students) water polo coach Igor Samardzija, whose team advanced to the NCAA Final Four last season before losing, 10-7, to USC  (17,380 undergraduates), which defeated Cal (25,540 undergrads), 12-10, in the final.  

“It’s a matter of drive and desire by our guys to compete on the highest level,” Samardzija said. “For us, it’s always a question of conditioning. If we manage to raise that to the highest possible, then we are able to compete against these guys, these big schools.”

Competitive water polo, with its unique type and level of conditioning, requires elite athletes with an uncompromising commitment to fitness.

“It’s the single most ungrateful sport to get back in shape,” Samardzija said. “A six-month—even a three-month—break can damage your career. It’s really tough to get back in shape [for the sport]. We should invite every other athlete from the different sports for a day of practice (laughing).”

The typical professional baseball player wouldn’t last five minutes in the pool.

“Our guys were just now prepping up. They did 4,000 meters, and it was an easy practice,” Samardzija said.

Samardzija, of Serbian and Croatian descent, coached in Serbia and played for club teams Tent and Red Star. He coached the men’s and women’s club teams at Columbia University, leading the school to three state titles. He is licensed as a water polo coach by the Italian Olympic Committee and is a volunteer coach and referee at Asphalt Green in Manhattan.

In 2009, Samardzija replaced Carl Quigley, who coached St. Francis, his alma mater, for 34 years and whose resume included six northern division championships and an NCAA Final Four in 2005. In Quigley's final two years, his teams had the NCAA’s highest GPAs in the sport.

Upon being hired, Samardzija had said, "My mission is to prove that championship-caliber water polo is played outside of California by eventually bringing the national NCAA title to Brooklyn Heights where it belongs.”

With the 2011 season just underway, St. Francis is No. 11 in the preseason national rankings, the only non-California school in the top 14.

We asked Samardzija where recreation-level water players and newcomers to the sport might go in New York City to play.

“There are a couple of recreational programs,” Samardzija said. “One is at Asphalt Green on the upper east side (92nd Street and York Avenue). And at St. Francis, on Fridays we open our doors to alumni and people from the area to swim and play. Columbia is a club team, so they have a little harder time to get pool time.

“The New York Athletic Club’s A team is the current national club champion. They have two or three teams, but you have to be a member to swim there.

“My best advice to anyone looking to play is to get in touch with me, or with anyone in the water polo world around here. It’s a relatively small sport, especially on the east coast, and everyone knows everyone. We can always recommend something. For example, on Fridays when our pool is open, or if we have an open practice and let people jump in.”

Asphalt Green: 212-369-8890
St. Francis College Athletics: 718-489-5490

Nutrition and Sports

With the NFL preseason winding down and players getting ready to break training camp, we caught up with Heidi Skolnik, who was a nutrition adviser to the New York Giants for 18 years as well as to the New York Mets and to athletes from the NBA and WNBA, MLB, and MLS.
     Skolnik is the owner of Nutrition Conditioning Inc., a New York consulting practice that helps individuals, teams, and companies set and reach health and performance goals. Her clients include the Juilliard School, the School of American Ballet, the Hospital for Special Surgery, and Fordham University athletics. We asked Heidi about sports nutrition and her time with the Giants.

Q. We have the ingredients and the calorie counts listed on everything we buy now. Are people more aware of nutrition?
Skolnik: I think our appreciation of it is better. People are more open to hearing about it, more ready to ask questions and to embrace the message. The calories and the ingredient list might be on the label, but you don’t know what to do with the information. There’s still just as much confusion, but there’s more motivation to find out what the answer is.

Q. How are the nutritional needs of professional athletes different from those of everyone else?
Skolnik: There are probably more similarities than you think. Timing of your meals, consistency from day to day, quality — that all matters for everybody. The professional athletes clearly have so many more calories: 4,000 to 5,000 daily. Some of them do really great with that. Others either have trouble keeping their weight on or keeping the weight off. Or even within that day, one player, even with 4,000-5,000 calories, won’t eat a vegetable or a piece of fruit. So, quality-wise, there was a little room there.

Q. What about diet and performance?
Skolnik: The players can’t afford to be off. When they’re playing, their recovery matters more if they’re going to be on or off for the next day’s workout. But they have a lot more calories to play with. Their diet is going to affect their performance.

     It’s going to affect your own performance, too, but you idea of performance is different. When you go to a meeting, you want to be alert. You don’t want to be falling asleep. But you don’t need the same calories because you’re not doing the same physical work. Your goals are different. You both care about performance, but what performance means to you is different.

Q. With football players, you were also dealing with different times of the year. The weather is comfortable in the spring, but during training camp in mid-summer it gets very hot and humid. And late in the season or in the playoffs, the players could be in sub-freezing temperatures. How does all of that play into their regimen?
Skolnik: Time of the year matters, as does fatigue. And access to foods is different at training camp from when the players are on their own. Interestingly, you can actually be burning more [calories] when it’s cold than when it’s hot, but you think you’re sweating more in the heat than in the cold. So, yeah, all of those things we took into account.

Q. How did the Giants players respond to your message?
Skolnik: Usually at dinnertime I would do this educational interactive display thing with them. We might play Nutrition Jeopardy or Nutrition Trivia. I found when I made it into a game, I got a lot more takers. The players are completely competitive. If I said, “Here’s a nutrition question. Do your best to answer it,” I might get 10 guys.
     If I put a little basketball hoop up and said, “If someone makes a basket, you have to answer a nutrition question and then you are in for a raffle to win a prize,” I’d get 30 guys. Any time I made it competitive, the participation rate increased. So, of course, I always tried to make it competitive.

Q. One size does not fit all.
Skolnik: Like all of us, the players have to be looked at as individuals: where they come from, how old they are, if they’re single or married, and how many years they’ve been on their own. Some of them love to cook, other don’t. Some of them would never eat fast food, others like fast food.

     There are some performance nutrition issues they all have to care about, but how that’s applied is very individualized. So, again, some might be eating a lot of protein, others a lot of carbs or fat. Some may not be paying any attention to what they eat. They are individual players with a common professionalism toward what they do.

Q. Are their nutrition needs different from those of athletes in other sports?
Skolnik: They are team athletes, not runners or cyclists who really tend to pay way more attention to their nutrition because it’s so much more directly related. In team sports, there are a lot of factors that go into how you do on the field. And they’re all at different stages of paying attention to all the different factors going on that help them to be the best that they are.

Q. Any anecdotal fitness tales?
Skolnik: A few years ago, a now-retired Giants player came back to visit. He’d gone on to another team. He was not a No. 1 draft pick and had to really work for his spot. And he said to me, “If it wasn’t for nutrition, I guarantee I wouldn’t have played as long. I got five extra years.” That was really rewarding.

Q. What was his background?
Skolnik: This veteran had come to me thinking that he wasn’t seeing results from his training. So we looked at it. He would sleep in in the morning. Then he would lift, he’d do his training, and get his treatment. He’d hang out for a while and then he’d go home. By the time he got home, he was famished. Basically, he wasn’t eating enough to fuel his training. So he was in a breakdown mode, not a build mode. He’d eat a lot in the afternoon, take a nap and start all over.
     So, I got him this Captain Marvel lunchbox and I filled it with trail mix, applesauce, granola bars and yogurt, cheese sticks — all these grab-and-go things for him to eat before he came in and while he was here. He got totally made fun of by his teammates for having this lunchbox, but then they all wanted their own lunchboxes. They all went through the different superhero characters they wanted… Captain Marvel and Superman and so on.

Q. Tell me about the nutrition game you played.
Skolnik: One day we were playing Nutrition Tic-Tac-Toe with the rookies. They were divided into teams. I wanted five sources of carbohydrates. They were down to the last square to win and the spokesman for one team said, “Pasta.”

Good.

And then he said, “Spaghetti.”

“Noodles.”

“Macaroni.”

“Ravioli.”

I gave it to him for creativity.

H-O-R-S-E in the Park

I spoke with Ira Berkow in 2007 following his retirement after a distinguished 40-year career in journalism, including 25 years with the New York Times, where he wrote the Sports of the Times column. A native of Chicago, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author has written 18 books and the 2010 documentary “Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story.” I caught up with him again and we talked about basketball, a game he continues to enjoy watching and playing.

“Ira, now that you are retired from the Times, do you still get to the park to get in a few shots of a different kind?”

“Yeah, I still do that,” he said. “Absolutely. I don’t play games anymore because of my double hip replacement, but I go and I shoot. I had played high school basketball and college basketball…. I’ve played my whole life. I haven’t stopped shooting. I’m 71.

“And we have a basketball court in my [apartment] complex [on the east side]. So, I’ll be shooting and sometimes I’ll see a kid at the other end of the court, playing at the other basket. And if he looks like he could be competitive and that it could be fun for me, I’ll ask him if he wants to play a game of horse. That’s what I do. I play horse.

“This one kid, a few months ago, he looked pretty good, and so I asked him if he’d like to play. He comes over to my side—he’s about 16 years old—and we played a game of horse, and I beat him. We played another game, and I beat him. And we played a third game of horse, and I beat him. It looks like he has a pained expression on his face. He gets his ball and is about to leave. But I didn’t want him to leave with a hurt feeling, so I said, ‘It took all the tricks I had in my bag to beat you.’

“And he looked at me and he said, ‘Are those all the tricks you have in your bag?’

“Well, I got my comeuppance (laughing). I don’t know. Make of that what you will, but that’s what he said. He was unimpressed.”

Lip Reading

Anyone who watches sports has witnessed coaches and players, in every game, who are afraid of lip readers. They hold their hand, their glove, or their play card up to their mouth to hide what they are saying from opponents and prying eyes. I used to attribute it to paranoia until Ernie Accorsi, the former general manager of the Baltimore Colts, Cleveland Browns, and the New York Giants, set me straight.

“I’ll tell you an incident that actually won the divisional title for us in 1977,” Accorsi said. “We had an assistant coach named Bobby Colbert, who had been the head coach at Gallaudet School for the Deaf in Washington. He had been educated in lip reading. There’s a science to it. That was the only way he could communicate with his players.

“We were losing to the Patriots in the last game of the season in a game we needed to win to win the division. If we lost, we’d be out of the playoffs. We had third-and-18 at our own 12. Their defensive coordinator was yelling, ‘Double safety delayed blitz.’

“Colbert read his lips with binoculars, got the word to [Colts quarterback] Bert Jones, who checked off and threw a pass down the middle of the field to Ray Chester for an 88-yard touchdown. That basically broke the game open and won the championship for us.”

I questioned how many coaches knew that story.

“That is an extreme example from a person who had tremendous expertise in it,” Accorsi said. “But now, teams have so many coaches — some have 21 — that they have people assigned on binoculars to try to read lips. They do!

“You used to send the plays in with players. Now, the offensive coordinator or the head coach is calling the plays in his headset. The quarterback is listening to it in his headset and the coach has to mouth it [the play call]. That’s why he’s obscuring his face.”

It's Only Words...

As the Bee Gees sang over 40 years ago, “It’s only words, and words are all I have to take your heart away.” Here are some word abuses that, coming as they so often do from people who are paid to write or speak, are particularly disheartening: 

Enormity
When the slave trader Batiatus (Peter Ustinov) sycophantically addresses the Roman general Crassus (Laurence Olivier) as “Your enormity” in “Spartacus,” he is accurately, if inadvertently, recognizing the excessive wickedness of Crassus. I've heard sports-talk hosts pompously and repeatedly misuse the word as a synonym for enormousness.

Disinterested

It doesn’t mean not interested. It means unbiased or impartial. An arbiter should be disinterested but not uninterested in a decision.

Roll out
A perfectly useful term to describe a football play in which the quarterback takes the snap and then runs along the line of scrimmage with the option to pass or run. Non-sports reporters now habitually write such drivel as “Acme announced plans to roll out its new gadget package.”
      No one, it seems, simply introduces a product or plan anymore. And, by the way, products and plans are out, replaced by “packages.” Which are activated, rolled out across multiple platforms, and ramped up -- whatever that means. Or maybe they have to be ramped up first in order to get them onto the platforms.

Closure

A favorite word of traffic reporters. Roads are no longer closed; they are in a state of closure. Summer resorts, by the same token, would be closured for the winter and secret meetings would be held behind closured doors.

Impacted

Wisdom teeth can be impacted; wisdom can be affected but not impacted by something.

As well

Synonymous with “also,” “too,” and “and.” Memo to sports broadcasters: Tacking on “as well” to the end of any sentence which already includes one of those synonyms does not add gravitas to your statement, only redundancy. Using more than two of the above synonyms together brings new meaning to the term “triple double.”

Fortuitous
It doesn’t mean fortunate or lucky. It means happening by chance or accident.

Activity

According to weather forecasters, we no longer get rain; instead, we get a "rain situation" or "shower activity."