Women’s Water Polo Team Trying to Keep Its Cool

The wonder of it all still makes Maureen O’Toole put her hand to her mouth in amazement.

O’Toole, 39-year-old water polo player, gets recognized in public. She was stopped by strangers at South Coast Plaza. “Aren’t you Maureen O’Toole?” she was asked. “We saw you in the Olympics. Water polo is cool.”

That’s what becoming an Olympic sport can do. It can make your sport cool.

Six weeks after the U.S. won a silver medal in the inaugural Olympic competition for women’s water polo, real life returns and the question needs to be answered. How does women’s water polo stay cool?

For a week, NBC latched on to this team in Sydney. These trailblazing women were well-spoken, funny, intense athletes who had made sacrifices to play a sport in which there was little fame to be found, few riches to be mined.

The U.S. women kept winning and their TV time grew. Their gold-medal game against Australia was spine-tingling. Two goals were scored in the final 20 seconds and the last, the game-winner for Australia, was controversial.

“It would have been nice to win,” said team captain Julie Swail of Placentia, “but the controversy still has people talking.”

“I think people really enjoyed watching us,” O’Toole said. O’Toole, who had retired from water polo and is a mother of an 8-year-old, came back to the sport when it received Olympic status. The story of her perseverance made hers the face of women’s water polo.

O’Toole has been on a monthlong speaking odyssey. She talks to groups of business people, to school children, to sports teams. She has talked until she lost her voice, and people still want to hear of O’Toole’s Olympic experience.

“A little boy in Illinois asked me if I’d come out of retirement again for a million dollars,” said O’Toole, who is retired for good now. “I said no and he asked what if I got a billion dollars.”

O’Toole paused a moment. “I said no again.”

But when little boys are asking O’Toole to come out of retirement because they actually think money is involved, something big has happened to the sport.

But women’s ice hockey had been cool too, in 1998 when the U.S. won gold in another inaugural Olympic performance for a sport. And then women’s ice hockey disappeared from our consciousness.

“It’s a little different for us,” said star player Brenda Villa of Commerce, who is now playing for Stanford.

“Water polo is an NCAA sport now, with an NCAA championship, so I think that’s going to help a lot.”

What the U.S. women’s water polo team also has that ice hockey doesn’t is a national training center. The water polo team has a pool, a gym and locker rooms at the Los Alamitos naval air station. It has a home.

The team also has a role model.

In Sydney the water polo players spent some time with the U.S. women’s soccer team. It wasn’t all about female bonding. O’Toole says that the water polo players wanted to pick the brains of the soccer team.

“We admire the way the soccer team has taken over its own future,” O’Toole said. “They’ve done their own thing, had their own tour and now they have their own league. They weren’t afraid to speak out and do the things they thought were right.”

Of course, soccer has a much bigger base to start with. Water polo is a West Coast sport. Not one of the 2000 Olympians was born east of the Rockies. Only four of the 14 members were born outside of California.

“Having this be an NCAA sport should help us get new people,” said Robin Beauregard of Huntington Beach, a UCLA junior. “I know there are good teams in the Midwest.”

Guy Baker, the national team’s coach, thinks it will be important for the Big Ten and Southeastern conferences to embrace women’s water polo and add league competition so that the sport will continue to grow.

O’Toole thinks it’s important for the women of 2000 to keep promoting the sport.

The Olympic glow won’t last forever. Or even a year. O’Toole and Swail, who is the new coach of the UC Irvine team, haven’t been at home for a minute since coming back from Sydney. If someone wants them to talk about water polo O’Toole and Swail will be there.

Women’s water polo players don’t expect to make money playing their sport. They understand that dreaming about a U.S. professional league is unrealistic just yet. But having the Olympics is plenty for now.

And when it seems easy to be disillusioned with the Olympics and their tarnished image of fat cat bribe-takers and drug-enhanced athletes, remember that there is another Olympics. The Olympics where you find women just happy to be there.

*

Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com