By Aimee Berg
 
The MPSF is the toughest men's water polo conference in the country. Long dominated by Stanford, Cal, UCLA and USC, the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation never featured a men's team with a female head coach. That is, until August 2023 when Gina Mata'afa took over at Penn State Behrend. Three months later, her peers in the MPSF-East voted her Head Coach of the Year.
 
In that short time, she managed to turn around a team that hadn't won a game since 2019.
 
For senior Eli Anderson, that was nearly his entire college career.
 
"The two seasons where we didn't win any games was one of the hardest times in my life," said Anderson, who grew up in Encinitas, California. "A lot of people asked why I stayed. Gina gave us a reason. She never lost faith in us. She started training us the way they trained her when she played professionally. Our first two tournaments, we won two games."
 
In 2023, the Lions finished 7-26, tying the school's single-season win record for men's water polo.
 
At the same time, Mata'afa was head coach of the women's team. She had taken over early in the 2022-23 spring season when Joe Tristan left after 20 years as head coach.
 
Junior Marley Persch said Mata'afa also made an immediate impact on the women's team. Persch was recruited as a center, but she hadn't played that position since middle school. "It was intimidating," she said. "I'm 5-foot-8, not the largest. But Gina used to wrestle. A big part of that is learning to use other people's momentum against them so she helped me a lot with the fundamentals – how to turn people where I want them to go and box them out."
 
Surprisingly, before Mata'afa came to work in Erie, Pennsylvania, she had only coached water polo for one summer when she guided Italy's U18 women's squad between pro seasons in Italy. Had it not been for a 2019 eye injury during a championship game, she might have ended up working in supply-chain management, in which she has her Master's degree.
 
"I blocked a shot and [my opponent] finished her shot in my right eye," Mata'afa recalled. Mata'afa kept playing. Soon, she noticed blood streaming down her face. For the next six months, Mata'afa played for Rari Nantes in Bologna with two stitches in her eyeball. Then Covid hit and, in August 2020, she went home to Hawaii. An eye surgeon there told her that one more blow to the eye could result in total vision loss.
 
After surgery, Mata'afa retired and sought a coaching job to ease the transition from being a professional athlete to, as she put it, "a regular person that doesn't compete every day."
 
She considered Division-1 UC Irvine and Division-3 Penn State Behrend.
 
"I was always told, 'Go where you're wanted the most.' That's what I tell my kids, too, when I recruit." It was clear they wanted her in Erie.
 
Mata'afa had been a three-sport athlete at Lahainaluna High School: running cross-country, wrestling, and playing goalie on the water polo team until her senior year when she asked the coach if she could get out of the cage at least once before graduation and score a goal. She did that – and more.  She broke the school's single-season scoring record. Later, as a center for Notre Dame College in Ohio from 2011-2015, she was named Rookie of the Year, Offensive Player of the Year, team Captain, MVP, and All-Conference.  Post-college, she was recruited to play for Durham University in England where she earned her Master's, followed by one year for Rari Nantes Imperia where she was the top goal scorer, and three years at Rari Nantes Bologna where she led the team to three championship playoffs. 
 
"But I always look at my background and say, 'It's not enough.' I think women do this a lot," she said, but Penn State Behrend convinced her how much her experience could make a difference there. And they gave her an opportunity to grow. She was named assistant coach in 2021.
 
"I didn't realize how much I would love it!" said Mata'afa, 30. 
 
"Gina's got a passion for water polo like I've never seen," said Penn State Behrend's athletic director Brian Streeter.
 
"She's a great role model," he said. "She demands a lot. She doesn't take much crap. She says, 'This is how we're gonna do it. Do you want to be successful? Keep doing it my way.' The male players were excited about the year. The women now are working hard because they know she's expecting them to be at a certain level when they come in.
 
"And she's never about herself," Streeter added. "I was thrilled when she was named MPSF-East Coach of the Year by all her peers. They recognized what she's doing for water polo. We've never had anybody get that type of award."
 
Besides coaching, Mata'afa's other great love is her home state of Hawaii. She grew up in Lahaina, on Maui, as one of seven children.
 
"Gina is the heart of the family, born right in the middle," said her mother, Sophie.
 
Gina looked up to her two much-older sisters, especially Lia, the eldest, who was a Hawaii state champion in girls' wrestling, a world champion in amateur MMA, and who tried to represent American Samoa in wrestling at the 2012 Olympics. (The Mata'afas' great-great-grandfather, Iosefo, was king of Samoa in 1898.)  Lia is now a flight attendant for Hawaiian Airlines so Gina can fly for a nominal fee when she's recruiting players.
 
"I love recruiting," Gina said. "That's one of my favorite things to do as a coach, besides coaching. I'll hit places that a lot of Division-3 or D-2 schools don't want to go because it's too far away or not in their budget."
 
She can easily hop to New Zealand, for example, when she's in Hawaii. "I get the higher players that the other D-3 and D-2 coaches aren't even attempting to talk to."
 
Lia, 43, said she isn't surprised that her little sister is coaching water polo, or that she's coaching men. "I guess with brothers, she knows how to speak their language," she said.
 
The two youngest Mata'afa boys, Hercules, 28, became a defensive end for the Minnesota Vikings and now plays for the Birmingham Stallions in the United Football League, and Matai, 22, plays on the defensive line for the U of Montana.
 
All seven kids are accomplished athletes, humbled by their humble beginnings.
 
But Gina said she didn't realize until college that she had been raised in low-income housing. She didn't consider how her parents would eat rice while the children ate steak. Or how her father would bicycle 12 miles to his hotel maintenance job so the children could use the car.
 
"We didn't really know we had nothing," she said. "My parents always made it work."
 
Eventually, the family moved out of the projects and into a rental unit across the street. After Gina went to college, her parents bought a house with government assistance.
 
"They worked their whole lives and they finally got to buy a home," she said.
 
Then, on August 8, 2023, all three former homes were incinerated when high winds snapped a power line and a grass fire quickly became an inferno engulfing the town and killing at least 100 people, the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century.
 
At the time, Gina was on campus in Erie, hosting an international water polo camp with her younger sister, Lalelei, 26, a center for the U of Hawaii. At around 2 a.m. Eastern time, Lalelei bolted into Gina's room, saying there was a fire in Lahaina and their parents weren't answering their phone. Neither was Hercules, who was back in Maui. The women checked fire maps on the web and watched as the blazes spread. Finally, their brother Saumalu, who worked in the Maui mayor's office wrote, "The house is gone. There's nothing left."
 
For a while, Gina's parents stayed with her older sister Anna and Anna's six kids on the other side of the island. Eventually, her mother left for Oahu. Her father, Sama, stayed on Maui, in a hotel, and filled out paperwork. Eventually, her parents were given temporary housing in Wailea for a year. But on October 7, they were told to move.
 
Finally, a local hotel where four of the seven Mata'afa children had worked in their youth granted her parents a room.
 
Meanwhile, Penn State Behrend started a clothing drive to help the Hawaii relief efforts.
 
The entire athletic department pitched in.
 
"We figured with 400 athletes coming back to start the school year, if they just bring one item," it could be useful, Streeter recalled. "We probably shipped 45 boxes of clothing. Gina coordinated it, boxed it all up, found an address [to receive it], took it to the airport – on top of coaching."
 
All this was happening while Gina was still waiting to hear, officially, if she had landed the promotion to head coach.
 
"She had to go through the normal hiring process," Streeter explained. It was a multi-step procedure. "But Gina didn't stop working, getting paid assistant's pay," he said, until official word came on August 19, two days before classes began.
 
Anderson, who, by then, was one of the men's team captains, heard about the fires on the news. "We tried support her as a group as best we could because she was supporting us. She was staying strong for us. She stayed strong throughout the whole season. And that gave us even more of a drive to push ourselves to win. We knew she wasn't going to stop no matter how difficult the circumstances she was in."
 
"Almost every team we played, the coaches would talk to us about how we looked like we cared. We looked more passionate. We looked like we wanted to win every single game. We were scrappy. We were hungry. We had better sportsmanship, better morale. People were seeing it."
 
Personally, he said, "It was my last chance to really prove to all my competitors, to myself, to my coach, and to my team that I could be a great water polo player. And we did. We came together and made it happen."
 
Just like Gina Mata'afa knew they could.
 
Postscript: During the reporting of this story, Gina went home to Lahaina for the first time since the fire. On December 15, she shared her thoughts:
 
"As soon as I saw Maui on the plane I started crying…I have nothing against people trying to enjoy their vacation but hearing everyone talking about what they're planning on doing and seeing in Maui… made me feel worse. I don't think majority of visitors know exactly how bad things are here. 
 
It's strange mix of emotions. I am happy to be home hanging out with my parents, nieces, and nephews but seeing all the local families living in hotels and seeing my parents trying to make a hotel room a home broke my heart. They're putting on a happy face for their kids and grandkids but my parents are givers and they have nothing to give.
 
"Daisy (my English bulldog) is doing well. She still doesn't understand why she can't go home. She was happy to see me. We enjoyed a long beach day after seeing [what was left of] Lahaina."