Rebecca Gonzalez graduated this year as the captain of Nipomo High School’s water polo team. Before her freshman year, she said, she had never played water polo or swam competitively.
“I sucked,” she said flatly. “I—honestly, I sucked so bad. I just kept at it because I liked it.”
Now, Gonzalez plays water polo for Allan Hancock College—the first girls’ water polo team that the school has ever fielded. They picked up their first victory this weekend, beating Pasadena 10-9 at a tournament in the L.A. Valley. Gonzalez put four of those points on the board, helping the Bulldogs bounce back from some early trouble to a win.
That game, she said, was “really good.” The Bulldogs pulled off a win, even though Gonzalez thinks they’re still learning to play as a team.
“It was really tough. But once it was 1 to 1, or 2 to 2, we didn’t want to lose,” she said.
The Northern Santa Barbara County Athletic Round Table, in turn, named her an athlete of the week.
“I thought, ‘Oh, that’s so cool!’” she told the Sun. “There are people who are farther into their seasons—I thought, ‘I’ve played two games and I’m already athlete of the week?’”
Way back, Gonzalez said, she “was going to do soccer. But it just wasn’t my thing.” Something else was her thing: “just to hang out in the water.” Of the meeting between her and the sport of water polo: “It was perfect.”
At Nipomo, she had a slew of coaches—good and bad—and struggled to get better. “It was kind of embarrassing to watch the people who swam and who were really good,” she recalled. “I just kept at it.”
She’s still keeping at it. At Hancock, that means waking up before 6 a.m. She leaves from Nipomo at 6:20, arrives at Hancock around 6:40, and starts setting up the pool for practice. She and her teammates then hone their skills in the pool from 7 to 9 a.m.
But the hardest part about water polo, according to Gonzalez, isn’t having to wake up early. “It’s trying to stay above the water,” she said. “Trying not to let the other girl drown you.”
It’s a brutal sport. “Girls like to grab suits, and scratch, and kick,” Gonzalez explained. “I’m not one to be super aggressive from the start, but it’s part of the sport. When a girl continues to do it to you”—her eyes opened wide, and she smiled, looking a bit guilty—“you have to punch her back. You have to kick her back.”
This article appears in Sep 24 – Oct 1, 2015.