Death Valley of Water Polo : Area Thirsts for a Winner but in Rich Corso Harvard Has Found Wellspring for Success

Rich Corso swings open the bottom drawer of his desk and tosses the live phone receiver in among notebooks and old newspaper clippings. With the back of his hand, he slams the drawer closed, violently pinching the cord.

Surrounded by framed magazine covers that glamorize his sport, Corso swivels forward in his office chair and glares across his word processor. All calls are on hold--Corso is ready to talk water polo.

He’s outspoken, blunt and has the attitude of a guy you’d want on your side in a bar fight.

His resonant voice, filled with East Coast inflection, carries well beyond his slight build. His boisterous manner is not what you’d expect of a water polo coach at a private school of 500 boys in the hills of suburban Los Angeles.

Corso has brought a bit of East Hartford swagger to Harvard water polo. At 33, he already has been an assistant at Stanford, the head coach at Yale, and, most recently, an assistant at UCLA for 10 years. He was an assistant on the U. S Olympic team in 1984 and currently coaches the junior national water polo team, a U. S. squad composed of the best 20-and-under players in the nation. Typically, none of the players on the junior national team is from the Valley.

“If a guy from Connecticut, from New Haven, who swam in East Hartford, can learn the game, then the guys who are native Californians, who are exposed to it from when they are 10 years old, should be doing pretty good,” Corso said.

This is not just the bluster of an ex-club player from Southern Connecticut State College. If there is anyone who can resuscitate water polo in the San Fernando Valley, Corso’s peers believe he is the man for the job.

The area has been a virtual death valley for the sport since Crespi won the Southern Section 2-A Division championship in 1981.

This season, Corso’s second at Harvard, the Saracens are the only Valley team ranked in the Southern Section on any level. Harvard, ranked No. 6 in the 2-A Division, is 22-5, including an 8-0 sweep through the Frontier League. And the Saracens, who defeated Lompoc, 8-5, Wednesday, have a chance to make a postseason impact.

Royal won its seventh consecutive Marmonte League championship this season, but the Highlanders have never advanced past the second round of the 3-A playoffs. Royal (15-9, 8-0) will try to equal its best finish with a first-round victory today over visiting Buena. Crespi, the Valley’s solitary link to past water polo glory, stumbled to a 7-12 record and barely made the playoffs. The Celts play at Gahr.

The relative anonymity of the sport is also evident at a broader level.

Every Olympian since 1960 has been a Californian, according to Monte Nitzkowski, the U. S. Olympic water polo coach in 1972 and 1984 as well as the boycotted 1980 Games. Yet, Nitzkowski doesn’t remember one of those players calling the Valley home.

Nitzkowski, 58, is in his 34th season as coach at Long Beach City College. The eight-time U. S. National team coach is puzzled by the lack of water polo talent in the Valley.

“Something got lost in the shuffle out there in the Valley,” Nitzkowski said. “You would have expected that to be an aquatics hotbed. They’ve always had the potential, but it fell out of focus somewhere along the line.”

So why doesn’t Valley water polo match up to programs in Orange County and South Bay? Every year the rankings are filled with the names of powers such as Corona del Mar, Newport Harbor, Miraleste and Mission Viejo.

Mission Viejo Coach Ron Osumi dismissed the notion that Orange County players all but live at the beach and, therefore, have a natural bent toward aquatic sports. Instead, he said, competitiveness and a strong tradition provide the edge.

“There’s this image that all these kids do is surf and play water polo,” said Osumi, whose team is ranked sixth in the 3-A Division. “But they have other interests.

“I think it’s because when you play the best, you end up being like that.”

Bill Barnett, whose teams have won 10 CIF-Southern Section titles in his 21 years as coach at Newport Harbor, traditionally has one of the finest high school water polo programs in Southern California. The Sailors are 23-4 this season, and ranked No. 2 in the 4-A.

In Barnett’s view, the players can’t help but have some of the area’s resources rub off on them.

“I think at the beach schools the kids are generally more interested in water,” he said. “And then it helps create an environment where the kids become more skilled because they want to swim or surf or become lifeguards.”

Although the Valley is landlocked and nearly an hour’s drive from the Pacific Ocean, many area experts said financial constraints, extinction of youth programs and poor planning of facilities are at the root of the problem.

“It just didn’t seem like they ever came up with the high school athletic facilities or the consistent feeder programs,” Nitzkowski said. “It could have been one of the most productive areas.”

Instead, Valley water polo has drowned in varying levels of apathy and budget cuts.

No Valley City Section school has a water polo program, and only seven of the 17 offer swimming. Birmingham, a city power in water polo and swimming in the 1960s and early 1970s, has stayed afloat through the efforts of Nick Rodionoff, who has coached at the school for a quarter of a century. Under Rodionoff, the Braves won nine consecutive city swimming championships from 1962 to 1970. Birmingham also had won four City titles in a row before his arrival. The water polo team was solid but not spectacular, once finishing as the City Section runner-up in the early ‘70s.

Shortly thereafter, according to Rodionoff, “it all went bottom-up.”

“We miss it,” said Rodionoff, whose son plays water polo for Santa Monica. “There were 10 city schools with water polo. Now, there are none.”

Rodionoff, also the diving coach at Pepperdine, puts the blame squarely on the Valley’s lack of facilities and feeder programs. The clubs and schools that were the source for high school swimmers and water polo players 15 years ago have closed, many because of rising operating costs that climaxed during this country’s energy crisis in the mid-70s.

“You need a feeder program,” Rodionoff said. “You need places to play before high school.”

Jim Herrick, owner of the Jim Herrick Swim School, has witnessed the deterioration of swim clubs and schools in the Valley, initially as the owner of the Sherman Oaks Swim School in the early and mid-70s. The latter shut down in 1976 after 26 years of operation. At the time of the closure, the school had approximately 600 students, including a club swim team. Herrick said that he owned the school but not the land it was on, and lost the school when the owner sold his property.

“It’s really too bad,” said Herrick, who coached against Rodionoff when both guided club teams. “Because in this valley, there’s really no place for a real team to get started anymore.

“There are not as many opportunities anymore. I run into people every day who are still devastated that the Sherman Oaks’ club closed down.”

Herrick estimated that there were 10 to 12 swim schools with club teams in the valley. Now, he’s hard-pressed to name one. The key, he said, is finances.

“To run a really good swim-team program you have to have use of the pool most of the day, and you want that whole pool,” Herrick said, “but the lesson program is really where you make the money.”

Only two Valley area high schools (Harvard and Royal) have age-group water polo programs. Not coincidentally, those two schools have the brightest futures for wide-scale success. Schools such as Crespi, Newbury Park, Thousand Oaks and Westlake have age-group programs on the horizon, but it takes several years for youth programs to affect high school teams.

“To be honest, we haven’t reaped the benefits of our age-group program until our present 9th- and 10th-graders,” said Royal Coach Steve Snyder, who started the club when he took the coaching position at Royal in 1980. “They’ll make the impact, but it’s been a slow, evolutionary process.”

Snyder’s program consists of 30 boys and girls split into three age divisions, 10-years-and-under, 11 and 12, and 13 to 15. There is also a girls open team for 13- to 18-year-olds.

The Harvard Water Polo Foundation, open primarily to seventh- and eighth-graders at Harvard, has been a popular addition to the water polo program since Corso arrived. Eighty students, from 7th to 12th grade, play water polo at the North Hollywood school.

“It would be like not having Pop Warner football or Little League baseball,” Corso said of his youth program. “Look at American baseball and why it’s so strong. And basketball. Because they have all those youth programs.

“Finally, we’re starting to see some decent high school soccer players. You go over to Balboa Park on a Saturday morning and that place is packed. It’s kind of what we’ve got to do. I’m not going to get a kid who comes in as a ninth-grader who’s going to be a great water polo player. It just doesn’t happen. You’ve got to develop your own.”

Thousand Oaks Coach Juan Bowen, who would like to start his own age-group program, put it in simpler terms.

“It’s easier to find a needle in a haystack if you’ve got a lot of needles,” Bowen said.

Finding a suitable pool in the Valley can be as difficult as discovering that elusive needle. In many cases, the well-being of a school’s water polo program is contingent on the availability of a competition-sized swimming pool. If a school has no pool on campus, however, the chances of renting one at its convenience are poor. Royal has access to a nearby Olympic-sized pool and Harvard’s 25-meter pool was built about a year-and-a-half ago.

Crespi Coach Jeff Thornton would prefer a pool on campus but makes do with practice sessions at Woodcrest School.

“I’ve talked to many coaches, and they say, ‘If I were in your position, I wouldn’t be there,’ ” said Thornton, who uses his own van to transport water polo players and equipment to daily practices.

According to Thornton, Crespi spends $8,000 a year in pool rentals alone, and that will increase when his age-group program is launched in December.

With Thousand Oaks’ pool under renovation, the Lancers, Westlake and Newbury Park have shared the facilities at Newbury Park. Each team is limited to two hours’ practice a day. “We would prefer five or six hours a day,” said Alan Locke, whose Westlake team finished third behind Royal and Thousand Oaks in the Marmonte League. “It has a drastic effect on how the team is run. You just have to budget the time really well. You need time in the water.

“I think not having a pool has an effect on how the program and the kids in the program perform. You could talk to any coach with a pool on their campus and they would say that it’s almost a necessity for swimming and water polo to have a pool.”

Junior Justin Cheen transferred to Harvard from Crespi after his freshman year. He’s now a part-time starter at Harvard and happy merely to be walking across campus to practice every day. At Crespi, Cheen many times boarded an RTD bus to make the trip from Encino to Cal State Northridge in time for water polo practice.

“It’s so much easier and less time consuming,” said Cheen, who transferred to Harvard for academic purposes. “You don’t have to hope for a varsity player to give you a ride.

“Coach Thornton, he was a very tough coach, but he just didn’t have the facilities to help him.”

Alemany, the only Del Rey League school without a water polo team, is in worse shape. Second-year swim Coach Kate Cerruti has tried to start a program but has come across too many obstacles. Alemany has no pool, and public pools are scarce. In fact, Cerruti’s swim team recently was evicted from Hubert H. Humphrey Memorial Park in Pacoima, apparently to clear the way for more public usage. Sylmar and Kennedy swim teams also practice there.

The unfortunate part is that 70 students attended Alemany’s water polo meeting in the spring.

“We mainly can’t afford it,” said Cerruti, who estimated she’d need between $5,000 and $6,000 to start the program. “And the sad thing is the kids really want it, but there are no pool facilities. If there are pools, they aren’t open or heated. The water’s out of them already.

“My program’s not going to get any better unless the kids swim year round.”

Birmingham’s Rodionoff, too, wonders why there aren’t more facilities open for public and private use through the winter months. Many of the city’s recreation and park pools were purposely built at an unofficial length and specifications--40 yards and two shallow ends--to deter competitive water polo and swimming, he said.

“It’s amazing for the number of kids who live here to have no facilities,” Rodionoff, 52, said.

The answer, again, is money. Charles James, the L.A. aquatics supervisor, has a motto: no cash, no splash. For example, James said it would cost $3,500 a month to rent Van Nuys-Sherman Oaks pool. That would include heating the pool, maintenance personnel, a lifeguard, electricity and chemicals.

That’s an expensive tab, even if it’s shared by two or more schools.

“We have trouble opening the pool in the summer with the expenses,” James said. “My pools already cost the city enough money.”

Still, if the money was there, James would be willing to open any one of the Valley’s six heated city-owned facilities.

“I’m perfectly willing to hustle up the figures and provide the staff,” James said. “But I don’t think it should be saddled on the taxpayers.

“They want us to pay for it. That’s what the bottom line is. They want to go in there with their water polo team and have their aquatics kingdom and not pay for it. They want the city to pay for it. And I don’t know how the taxpayer would react to paying for a private school to use the pool.”

As for the size of the pools, James said: “We had no intentions of getting into the competition department. We are a recreation department.”

So the Valley is sorely lacking in quality, warm pools and the time to use them. There are too few age-group programs, not enough interest, too much apathy and the majority of the water polo coaches are walk-ons. Orange County schools can be excused for showing unabashed delight at the thought of seeing even the Royals and Harvards of the Valley on their schedules.

Corso wants to change that, and he’s going about it with a physical, and intellectual, approach.

In his small office off the Harvard pool, Corso has a library filled with videos and reading material on the sport. His players routinely sift through the material, and are expected to practice what he preaches.

After nearly two years of coaching in the Valley, Corso feels he knows what the area lacks. It’s not so much the money, or equipment or even a pool right smack in the middle of campus. It’s time. Very cheap, but also very tough to come by.

“The last time a team in the Valley worked hard and put in the time was Crespi when they won it a few years ago,” Corso said. “I wasn’t close to that program, but I could see it from the college level.”

Harvard and Royal also travel frequently to play the water polo giants in Orange County and South Bay. The Saracens played Santa Monica, Redondo and participated in the South Bay tournament before this season’s Frontier League schedule. Crespi also played in the South Bay tournament.

“I tell the kids, and I tell the parents here, I have two things in life: my family and sports,” he said. “I don’t drive a fancy car, I’m not into clothes. The only thing I care about is water polo.”

If Valley coaches have any edge, it might be enthusiasm. There is no complacency in the better programs.

“I think Corso is a young guy who’ll be a real catalyst out there,” U. S. Olympic coach Nitzkowski said. “I really do. I’m seeing some new sparks of life up there.”

The questions remain, however. Can Corso bring a little pride and a lot of wins to the Valley? Will area teams ever match up with their Orange County counterparts?

“I think polo in the Valley is coming up,” Corso said. “I have to believe that. We’re all trying to come up in levels, and, well, you better be ready when you play us.”

Crespi’s Thornton said he’s already seen a change in his program with Corso’s presence.

“With Corso coming into the Valley, he’s already stepped up my program a little,” he said. “I believe that all kids will play up to the competition’s level.”

Snyder, himself an innovative coach and administrator at Royal, says the time may yet come for the Valley, as the arrival of Corso attests.

“It’s a thinking man’s game,” Snyder said. “The X factor is Richard Corso. They have improved so much in the one year he’s been there, it’s incredible.”

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