Italian Lesson

Wednesday night we don’t have pool time so we always travel to some nearby team for a training scrimmage. Two days ago we drove to Como which is on the south banks of Lake Como about an Hr and 15 min northwest of Bergamo. When we arrived temperatures outside were flirting with freezing but they had a very nice indoor swimming complex and I was eager to get in and play. As exciting as Tuesday swim-sets are (always 15x200m…always), I constantly look forward to Wednesday night where we actually get to play. While there are no defined quarters and goals aren’t recorded this doesn’t take away from the competitiveness. You still want to kick their ass every possession. There is no point of driving close to 3 hrs just to go through the motions.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what our team did. Como is a sporadic team that reminds me a lot of UCSD. They play a very unstructured game with people driving all over the place trying to capitalize on backdoors and homerun passes. This is not a successful way to play polo at this level but if the other team falls asleep and doesn’t stick to their style of play, they will quickly find themselves in a hole.
We did not follow our game plan and at a half time break our coach Andrea (Ahn-dray-ah) let us know. It’s sad but the first words the foreign kid always learns are the bad ones, and he gave us a lecture that night. Surprisingly there wasn’t much I didn’t understand because he stuck to my comfort area when describing on how we were playing. We were lazy on defense, and combining bad passes with stupid shots on offense. The second half we played a little better and ended up somewhere even against a poor Como team that we should have easily dominated. The ride back to Bergamo was dead silent the whole way.
With two days before our first official game I’m definitely ready. Playing water polo in a European league has been a dream as long as I can remember, and to be in Italy was always the number one choice. While my shoulder increasingly hurts with every practice, I know that with a couple Advil and a whole lot of adrenaline it’s not going to hold me back in the slightest. Plus for some strange reason I feel that I’ve actually been shooting better in practice than I have in a long time. I’m ready to drop some buckets Saturday and get the “W”!

Bus #10