When you think of a sport, you usually think feet moving on dry land. Not this sport. Water polo is an aquatic sport, played in a pool. Instead of running, the athlete’s swim, not only utilizing their legs but hands too just to move.

One of the spring sports coming up is in fact girls water polo, coached by Lana and Daniel Quindica.

“It’s a combined sport of soccer, basketball, and football,” said Coach Lana.

The sport involves putting the ball into a goal similar to soccer, but water polo athletes use their hands to propel the ball to the goal. In a game, there are seven players per team in the pool, six field players and one goalkeeper. So in total there are 14 players actively playing.

Coach Daniel has been coaching for 16 years, while Coach Lana has assisted him for about 10 years.

“After playing, I wanted to give back and have an opportunity to teach people who didn’t know water polo,” said Coach Daniel.

Although water polo is a girls-only sport at McKinley High School, water polo can be played by boys in the Olympics.

“We need to balance out the amount of girl sports we have and the number of participants for girls as opposed to the boys participating,” said McKinley athletic director Bob Morikuni.

One of the issues water polo here at McKinley has is its popularity. Not only is player recruitment an issue but fan attendance as well.

“I think one of the challenges we have is, because it’s not heard about and not popular, to try to to get people to come [to a sport] they’ve never seen before,” said Coach Daniel.