By Rebecca Nordquist

Coach Mariko Rooks remembers one fourth-grader who walked into the pool with a smile on his face each time. The boy was willing to try anything during class, despite very little experience in the water and difficulty learning the basics of swimming.
 
Then the final day of the six-week summer program in New Haven, Connecticut, arrived. The challenge? Swimming the length of the pool. The funny and charismatic boy, as Rooks describes him, had yet to accomplish that feat. He lingered until everyone went, biding his time. "When he finished and he hit the end of the pool, we erupted," Rooks says, her voice lifting with excitement. "I recall every single person on staff in the water, all of his classmates just cheering him on so loudly."
 
Head coach Andy Lewandowski had a similar experience with a seventh-grader. She also could not swim the length of the pool. But he knew she wanted to be stronger in the water. With two weeks left in that same program, he encouraged her to swim a lap—and she did. Four or five times. "She smiled and was so proud of herself," Lewandowski says.
 
These moments were a long time coming for Lewandowski and Rooks. On separate tracks, Lewandowski, a water polo player since 1984 and head coach of the youth club New Haven Hydras, and Rooks, a former Yale University water polo player and recent graduate of the Yale School of Public Health, had been working to make water polo more equitable and more accessible for people of color. An initiative with USA Water Polo and a partnership with Horizons at Foote School—a national academic and enrichment program for low-income families—in the summer of 2021 merged their tracks and ultimately created a blueprint for future community-focused water polo programs.
 
During the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, Rooks and a few former teammates created an Instagram post called "Under the Surface: Racism & Aquatics." In 10 slides, it outlined the history of racism in pools and its damaging effects that remain today. People, including water polo legend and change agent Brenda Villa, took notice—and consequently, so did USAWP. The organization asked the 23-year-old to join a newly formed racial equity and reform task force, co-chaired by Villa and John Abdou, chief high performance officer at USAWP. In part, the goal of the task force was to make recommendations to the board that in broad terms would increase equity in the sport and grow participation.
 
Rook's position on the task force mirrored what she was studying at Yale University at the time. "I'm really invested in amplifying and supporting communities as they advocate for the tools and the resources they need to dismantle inequities," says Rooks, who grew up in Los Angeles. For water polo, that translated into bringing new people to the sport who traditionally and currently don't have access to it.
 
That concept had been on Lewandowski's mind since the late '90s. He had coached water polo at Yale University, his alma mater, for about 14 years and had always "whined," he says, about the lack of opportunities in the area for people of color. "My wife just looked at me one day and said, 'You either need to do something or just stop complaining,'" he says.
 
Lewandowski finally did something. He started running summer clinics in 2010, and as interest in the community piqued, he started the Greater New Haven Water Polo Club and its team, the New Haven Hydras, four years later. "We were truly the Bad News Bears," he says, "but when I started the club, my intent was not for it to be focused on elite play. It was more to get the sport to be a little more accessible."
 
Lewandowski was ahead of his time. Water polo clubs in general were scarce on the East Coast—and even more scarce were opportunities for children of color. At the time, the Black and Hispanic communities accounted for almost 60% of the population in New Haven, according to the 2010 Census, and still do. "The challenge I ran into was we didn't really connect with the New Haven community," says Lewandowski, a Pennsylvania native. "I was getting people from all over the place. I had people from Massachusetts come in. In my mind, I always wanted the program to be more reflective of the community."
 
The New Haven Hydras has made headway in that area. The lower club fee, which covers the pool rental at Albertus Magnus College, tournaments fees and team equipment, makes the sport more affordable, and when possible, the club offers scholarships to bring new players in. Lewandowski, in all of his years of coaching youth water polo, has volunteered his time.
 
Still, Lewandowski wanted to do more. After being elected the chair of the Northeast Zone of USAWP in January 2021, he prioritized his long-held hope of recruiting a more diverse group of kids to the sport. Through USAWP, he met like-minded Rooks who was working toward the same goal. He also learned that Horizons at Foote School had an already existing aquatics component to its summer enrichment program—coincidentally at Albertus Magnus. They could integrate water polo into the swim clinics. In a twist, his wife worked for The Foote School and encouraged the connection. Lewandowski could not ignore the prompts.
 
"I saw a lot of things starting to connect, and I was able to reach out to all these groups simultaneously. Mariko was very gung ho, and Horizons and Albertus Magnus were open to doing this," he says. "I had the man and womanpower to help run the clinics, getting some of my [Hydras] players to get into the water with the kids."
 
The pilot program came together for the Horizons enrichment program at the end of June 2021. USAWP sponsored it, covering membership costs and insurance. The outcome was everything Lewandowski and Rooks could have hoped for. At the start of the program, 59 of the 61 participants were at the beginner level of swimming, with little to no experience. None knew the basic rules of water polo. And at the end? No one was left in the beginner level, and 30 were in advanced or highly advanced levels—and all knew the basic rules of water polo.
 
To add to the success, almost 20% of the children signed up to play for the Hydras in the fall and some were given scholarships by the team. "If you're looking to expand your club, this is a great way to do it," says Rooks, who served as the program director. "And on top of that, it will do so in a way that's equitable and gives people equal access to sport."
 
Casondra Roach's son Christian was one of the children who went on to play for the Hydras. As an incoming seventh-grader, he had learned how to swim through previous Horizon summer programs, but he had never played water polo. "He wasn't the strongest swimmer," Roach says, "so I think his motivation was that a lot of other people were faster than he was. He didn't feel like he could be on the team."
 
Roach and his coaches continued to encourage him, and he's now played in a handful of games with the Hydras. "He really just loves the water. Any excuse to get in there and play with other kids," she says. "I have seen the growth in him, and I feel like he's pretty much catching up with everybody."
 
Christian's story—and those of the fourth-grader and the seventh-grader that Rooks and Lewandowski worked with—is the success story. It's why Rooks and USAWP have worked to replicate the model—the FLOWS Community Hybrid Model—in other communities. There will be programs in Florida and Atlanta this year.
 
"The point is to make sure that the kids are water safe and that they're getting these kinds of opportunities to do this kind of work. And then hopefully, in two or three years, I'll be able to say that we sent a couple of them to Junior Olympics," Rook says, hope in her voice.

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of SkipShot magazine