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June 18, 2008
Olympics
Water Polo’s Premier Springboard
By PETE THAMEL
COMMERCE, Calif. — The most improbable American water polo pipeline began here one generation and four trash cans ago when a coach wanted to give her youth swim team a rest.

To break the monotony of training, the coach, Sandy Nitta, plopped four trash cans into the pool to serve as makeshift water polo goals.

Fast forward 30 years. Commerce, a working-class industrial city of 12,500 southeast of Los Angeles, has developed one of the most prolific and sophisticated youth water polo programs in the United States. The city employs two full-time and three part-time youth water polo coaches and spends more than $250,000 a year on its programs.

“It’s not a rich community, but what the city has done for water polo there has opened so many doors,” said Nitta, a former Olympic swimmer who now coaches youth water polo teams in Las Vegas.

With the United States women favored to win their first Olympic gold medal in water polo this summer in Beijing, two Commerce alumnae are part of the backbone of the team. Fittingly, the captain Brenda Villa and the sniper Patty Cardenas are so appreciative of the doors that the Commerce youth program opened for them that their ultimate goal is to play well enough to open doors for others.

Villa understands that the explosive growth of women’s soccer and softball in the United States was fueled by the gold medals the national teams won in Atlanta in 1996. She is eager to see if water polo gold, which the United States won at the 2007 Pan American Games, will lead to more trash cans being dropped into swimming pools throughout the country.

“It’s our country and our culture — it’s gold or it doesn’t matter,” said Villa, 28, who has earned bronze and silver medals in the last two Olympics. “To me, it’s my hope to bring home that gold medal. Then we’ll see. We’ll see if that’s what we needed all along to get our sport to be a national sport, not a California sport.”

Few places have Commerce’s water polo heritage or infrastructure. The city has a median family income of only $34,040, but children play water polo free year-round in a $20 million facility built with water polo in mind. The pool is designed to Olympic specifications and occasionally hosts the national team.

The city pays for its youth players to take bus trips to tournaments, their entry fees and for pool time. All a child needs is a bathing suit — and the cost of that is sometimes covered by booster clubs.

“We’re surrounded by areas prevalent in gangs and we’re very fortunate we don’t have gang problems in Commerce,” said Jim Jimenez, the director of parks and recreation, who has worked in the department for 35 years. “Our kids are kept busy in swim lessons and water polo and other things. It’s a community effort and it shows.”

Villa and Cardenas are first-generation Mexican-Americans. Cardenas’s parents and Villa’s mother have roots in the Mexican town of Tecalitlán. In Commerce, their mothers worked as cleaners, and Villa and Cardenas stumbled into water polo by tagging along with their older brothers. Before long, their weekends were crammed with as many as 10 games. The pool became their social hub.

“It was the thing to do,” Villa said.

Villa competed with and against boys at Bell Gardens High School, enduring plenty of snide comments. But the competition only improved her game, helping her develop the smarts and instincts that have contributed to her becoming one of the best players in the world despite being just 5 feet 4 inches.

“She’s small,” United States Coach Guy Baker said. “But she makes up for it with intelligence and being deceptively strong for her size.”

Villa, who played at Stanford, is a celebrity in Commerce, and is called upon to appear for Cinco de Mayo, Fourth of July and Mexican independence day celebrations.

Villa is so revered that when Cardenas spoke recently to a fifth-grade class in Commerce, the first question was, “Do you know Brenda Villa?” When Cardenas laughed and answered yes, the students, in unison, said, “Wow!”

“Their inspiration is immeasurable,” said Gabriel Martinez, one of the city’s full-time youth water polo coaches. “We ask the girls before the season who their heroes are, in and out of the water. One hundred percent say Brenda and Patty.”

Bell Gardens formed a girls water polo program when Cardenas, who is 23, was a freshman. By the time she graduated, the team had won four California Interscholastic Federation titles and lost just three games.

Like Villa, Cardenas spent her childhood playing with boys and being toughened up by her older brothers. One brother, Ivan, would kneel on her arms to execute something he called the Happy Slapper, which involved him slapping her face until she screamed for help.

Cardenas became so tough that after the webbing between her toes was ripped open during a youth game, she insisted on being taped up so she could continue playing.

Now a senior at Southern California, Cardenas will be playing in her first Olympics. She plans to continue competing through the London Games in 2012.

Water polo may be a fixture in Commerce, but it is not nearly as popular in the rest of the United States. None of the members of the women’s national team have the individual sponsorships that are common in swimming, soccer and gymnastics.

The team’s training headquarters is on a military base in Los Alamitos, Calif., a step down from the facility in Commerce. As the national team finished practice there one day recently, children paddled around on kickboards for swim lessons. The backdrop includes soldiers running and shouting, “I don’t know what I’ve been told,” and the constant reverberations from landing helicopters.

“We feel very safe there,” Cardenas said, smiling.

The spartan facility is a window into the sometimes thankless world of Olympic training. The United States Olympic Committee pays each athlete $2,500 a month, which does not support a glamorous Southern California existence.

“Obviously, we’re not in this sport to make money,” said Villa, who has played professionally in Sicily. “I’m grateful. It paid for school and I’ve traveled the world playing this sport. I think if more people knew how cool and special and unique the sport is, more people would play.

“But we’re not in it to be Shaq or Kobe status,” she added.

For now, Villa and Cardenas will settle for having that level of status in Commerce, for being contributors to an impressive legacy that sprung from the humblest of beginnings.

“The program there has just boomed,” Nitta said. “Every major youth national championship, whatever age group it is, Commerce is right up there.”

She paused and smiled. “And it all started with trash cans,” she said.



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