Water polo: A cult or a sport?

Mail & Guardian

3 days ago

Lured: Holidays are no longer at the beach and parents' social life is devoted to practices, games and tournaments. Photo: Supplied
As yet another school holiday approaches, interrupted by a sports tour, many readers may come to the conclusion that their school-going child has joined a cult. I am, of course, referring to the water polo team.
What was once a minor sport at school has inexplicably risen to cult status among any school with an Olympic size swimming pool (so no township schools then). Like any cult, water polo now demands absolute loyalty from its followers. Rituals include attending practices at 6am or 8pm on a Friday night (presumably to deprive the participants and their parents of rest) and endless tournaments, especially during long weekends and school holidays. Failure to attend any of these rituals leads to possible excommunication (from the team).
Separating followers from society is the aim of any cult. Water polo achieves this in spades. Parents are easily sucked into the cult, lured by the attraction that their kids cannot play water polo with a screen glued to their face.
As a result, family friends can no longer attend social occasions because little Johnny or Susie is at a practice, a match or a tournament (and we don't want him/her/them excommunicated).
Organising a get-together with friends involves weeks of planning to find those precious few hours when there is not a water polo something-or-other happening that day.
Families may also be affected, with the achievements of less sporty siblings being ignored or them being relegated to schlepping to every water polo event to support their better-performing brother or sister — and don't think they will ever forget (or forgive) this.
And then there is the 'us' versus 'them' on which every cult relies to protect its existence. Those who are not members of the water polo fraternity are denied the smugness of saying 'see you at the next event in Joburg/Durban/Cape Town/PE' followed by a look of surprise (or is that envy) that the 'outsiders' are not attending.
Those who dare question the devotion required of the sport are seen as promoting laziness over healthy exercise and no one wants to be accused of this.
Moving up the hierarchy is another characteristic of a cult. First team, junior provincial and junior national team attainment remain the ultimate goal of any follower, but not before you have paid homage at the high altar of 'the tour to Croatia', the reasons for which are never to be questioned. Other than the roughly R60 000 cost to parents and vast amounts of seemingly unsupervised time for the youngsters, a visit to Croatia seems to have little effect on the quality of the water polo played on the return home.
While this is an obvious tongue-in-cheek look at one sport, water polo, there is some science to the scrutiny of the cult-like devotion required today from young participants in sporting activities.
For the longest time, we have been told that success in sport requires a single-minded, all-in approach. Stories abound of athletes, at the pinnacle of their career, having devoted most of their waking life to their sport — think Tiger Woods. This view has been popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, repeating the idea that 10 000 hours of practice are needed to achieve mastery in anything. This may well be true, but at what cost?
A 2021 analysis of 6 000 athletes found that those who reached world-class status tended to have more multisport experience, started later in life, practised less and progressed more slowly.
Another study found that a single-minded approach to sport leads to less experimentation and propensity to avoid problems. This approach also leads to a tendency to narrowly define oneself by the success or failure at the sport you play. As a result, any failure becomes 'I am a failure' rather than 'I have failed', which, in turn, increases a fear of failure.
As is often the case, there is a knock-on physiological effect to this fear of failure. The threat-stress response to fear produces more of the stress hormone, cortisol, which encourages a shutdown of body functions and less of the hormone testosterone, which enhances performance. Simply doubling down and practising harder works for a while but then increases exhaustion, resulting, again, in a reduction in performance. It may also explain the 'crash and burn' experienced by some top-flight sports persons.
As the inability to restore performance continues, the temptation to use performance-enhancing drugs increases, which may explain the number of top athletes (and increasingly school children) being caught with such banned substances.
Sports coaches, administrators, educators and especially parents need to recognise that demanding too much of their young charges may not be in their long-term interests. Rather, the scientific evidence suggests that they should be encouraging some down time, including time with family and friends (and, yes, their iPhones), and leaving time for these kids to pursue a variety of other interests, which are more likely to survive and stand them in good stead after school is done.
So, as many families plan holidays, interrupted by yet another school water polo/rugby/hockey/netball festival, remember, it's just a sport.
Shaun Read is a parent.