Hydrodynamic

Karlee Sterling chuckles at the memory, but at the time, the black eye and bloody nose she suffered after getting slammed in the face by an opposing player’s head during one of her first varsity water polo games was no laughing matter.

“I knew it was a rough game, but I don’t think you really expect it to be like that,” she said. “I got my nose hit and it was really big for a week.”

Nothing like that ever happened to synchronized swimmers.

“They’re two completely different worlds,” said Sterling, who left competitive synchronized swimming after six years upon her enrollment at Westlake Village Oaks Christian High.

A junior two-meter defender for the Lions, Sterling, 16, was instrumental in starting the school’s girls’ water polo team, now in its second season of varsity competition.

She likens synchronized swimming to dance and ballet.

“It’s not aggressive at all,” she said. “Synchronized swimming is all about creativity and looks. It’s more like a performance.”

And water polo?

“It’s kind of like wrestling, only you have a ball too.”

The transition from grace and precision to rough and tumble has been smoothed by Sterling’s extensive experience in the water, where she appears to cut, slide and glide while less-seasoned teammates splash and thrash.

“Water polo was kind of a natural turnover for her,” Coach Kenn Gorman said. “She’s just kind of like an otter in the water. Like she’s supposed to be there.”

A measure of Sterling’s ease can be taken during practices.

While teammates hang by elbows catching their breath along the side of the pool during a rest period between warm-up laps, Sterling props her left leg straight up in front of her, hooks her heel on the pool’s edge and leans back in the water as if she’s catching a catnap in a recliner.

“When I quit [synchronized swimming], I could hold my breath for 2 minutes and 12 seconds. We timed it,” she said. “I can’t do that anymore, though. You have to work at it. It’s not something you can just jump in the water and do.”

Neither is synchronized swimming, which Sterling now coaches on the novice level.

“Synchronized swimming is the hardest sport I’ve ever tried,” she said. “It takes so much more work than it looks like. It’s more difficult because you’re upside down a lot of the time in the water, and you’re doing it all without air. Sometimes, no matter how badly you want to take a breath, you have to stay underwater.”

Some of Sterling’s best showings in the sport came near the end of her career.

As a 13-year-old, she placed 36th nationally among 12- and 13-year-olds in figures, technical competition that is akin to compulsory exercises in ice skating.

As a 14-year-old, she and two others from the Westwood-based Los Angeles Synchro Club won a regional competition in Arizona for 14- and 15-year-olds while swimming as a trio in May 2001. The same trio placed seventh in the U.S. Open in Hawaii that year.

But Sterling didn’t want to continue in the sport.

“As parents, we would have loved for her to continue,” said Kimbra Sterling, Karlee’s mother. “We did debate back and forth. We agreed with her decision. But it was a decision driven very much by her desire to do, I guess, normal things.”

Toward that end, Sterling served as Oaks Christian’s sophomore-class president last year. As a freshman, she and teammates Morgan Rohde and Jacque Pare prompted the school to establish a girls’ water polo squad by recruiting classmates to the program.

The Lions (2-5) so far have struggled to compete with more seasoned, aggressive teams.

Despite any bumps, bruises or bloody noses, Sterling seems to be adjusting. She even led the Lions in ejections because of fouls as a freshman.

“I guess I got a little excited about the roughness,” she said with a laugh. “It’s just a really rough game, but I love the aggressiveness.”