January 28, 11:00pm |
Photo by Shar Higa
The campus pool at Long Beach State is an unassuming facility—it’s outdoors, an Olympic-sized pool with short metal bleachers on two sides that seat a few hundred people. It’s protected by a low fence dorm students have been known to hop, surrounded by a smallish parking lot, and is open to the public for a few hours of lap swimming most days of the week. It’s not the largest pool in Long Beach, nor the most historic (both honors belong to Belmont Plaza).
You certainly wouldn’t know looking at it that it’s become the site of a bitter battle lately, over resources and history. On one side, the university that owns the pool, Long Beach State, with their Athletic Director, Vic Cegles, and men’s and women’s water polo coach, Gavin Arroyo. On the other side, Shore Aquatics, an aquatics club serving Long Beach-area athletes from under ten up through 16; a water polo club that’s won more national titles than any other in the country save one, and that’s called the modest campus pool their home for the more than thirty years that the club has been in existence, in one form or another.
In between? A tangled mess of relationships that’s hard to untangle, but make it easy to see why so many in the Long Beach water polo community were shocked, and angered, when it filtered into the public recently that Long Beach State wouldn’t be allowing Shore to use the campus pool past the end of April.
How tangled a mess are we talking about? The connections between the university and the club program go back generations. Shore was founded by Rich Foster, a former captain of the Long Beach State water polo team; Ricardo Azevedo, a former coach of the Long Beach State water polo team (and father of both local legend Tony, and former Long Beach State player Cassie); and Klaus Barth, an icon for the Long Beach aquatics community, and a Long Beach State Hall of Famer for swimming who left an indelible mark on the aquatics world that’s still clearly felt three years after his death.
The club is currently run by Chi Kredell, a Long Beach State water polo Hall of Famer who was named All-American as a 49er, and his wife, Barth’s daughter Kristin, who oversees the swim programs. Foster’s son John, also a former Long Beach State player, coaches water polo with Shore as well; in fact, looking through their staff, it’s hard not to find a Long Beach State connection with every member. Both Kredell and Foster were Shore athletes who went on to play as Long Beach State 49ers, in the same campus pool.
Given the close-knit ties between both sides, it takes a bit of explaining to understand how we came to this point. According to Kredell, who stepped up to take over as Club Director of Shore’s water polo operations a half-year ago (when Robert Lynn left to coach Harvard-Westlake), he says he encountered resistance pretty early on from Arroyo and the university. “I met with Gavin in August, and he said he wanted his own club,” Kredell says. “I told him we’d love his involvement, to have a D-1 coach working with our players would be amazing; but he said he wanted his own club.” According to Kredell, the ensuing months saw occasional conversations, but nothing emerged. Along with Arroyo’s desire to have his own program, Kredell says Cegles brought up with him the fact that the university wanted to increase their revenue for the facility use. “He told me he wanted more money, that he has to look out for his employees.”
Since the end of December, Kredell says, he hadn’t heard much of anything from the school. Then, last week, the word went out in the water polo community that the school was done with Shore, effective April 30. “I still haven’t officially heard it from the school,” Kredell said Thursday evening.
According to the university, the decision to remove Shore from the pool dovetails with the decision to create a new water polo club in the city, run by Arroyo out of the campus pool, called Long Beach Water Polo Club, which will begin in May. The reason for making the switch, according to Cegles and Arroyo, is twofold—one, Cegles hopes it will help renovate the facility and raise funds for the program. Two, both hope that added access to athletes will boost Long Beach State’s recruiting ability in the community.
“We’re trying to evaluate our program,” says Cegles. “Our coaches need to have their own club—would you have Wilson or Poly coaches running a basketball program in the Pyramid, in competition with Dan Monson?” The strong implication, from Cegles and Arroyo, seems to be that there is some chafing at the number of athletes developed by Shore on the Long Beach State campus who go on to play for other universities. “The fact is,” says Cegles, “we have a better chance [with the new club]. For us to have a more competitive advantage against USC and UCLA and Pepperdine, we need access to athletes as young players. It’s not about the money, it’s about the access—then hopefully it can also help with renovations and generating resources.”
Cegles also expressed surprise at the backlash the decision has received, and said he hopes the new club at Long Beach State will still draw from the Long Beach water polo community, despite the negative reaction. “I’m hoping some of them will come here…Does it really matter if it’s called Shore, or 49er Water Polo? I respect tradition, but we have to look at this from a business perspective.”
Arroyo certainly seems optimistic about the potential for the new club. “I think it could be something amazing,” he says. Acknowledging that with the depth of polo talent in the area, many players will simply want to leave Long Beach to play on the collegiate level, he says he hopes having his own club in the campus’ backyard will alter the local recruiting dynamic. “The kids that want to go to USC, maybe one of those three or four wants to stay here if they’ve been playing for me since they were 14. Maybe that player is the difference in some of the one-goal games we had last year.” He also pointed out the additional recruiting benefit of being able to offer Long Beach State players jobs as coaches in the club program.
“Obviously,” he admits, “there’s been some fallout and backlash.” Citing a lasting respect for Klaus Barth, he said he will still allow some of the Shore swim programs to use the campus pool (Long Beach State does not have a swim program that would be competing with other schools recruiting from Shore). The Shore masters swim program will, like the water polo teams, be forced to relocate.
According to Kredell, Wilson seems the most likely place to move most of the affected programs to, and Wilson aquatics coach Tony Martinho, who’s been the beneficiary of a lot of great Shore athletes, confirmed that he’s spoken with Kredell about that. A problem it raises for Shore is that none of the high school-located pools are as large as the one on the Long Beach State campus, which easily allowed for multiple teams to practice simultaneously.
“What it comes down to,” says Cegles, “is I have to make a decision that’s best for our program, for the facility, and the team. Our whole thing is to advance the program.”
For Kredell, advancing the program is a familiar concept; in addition to his playing days, his family have been longtime boosters of the water polo program at the university, with his mother running the snack shop at the pool in Arroyo’s early coaching days, and his parents hosting the Long Beach State Water Polo Alumni Dinner a year and a half ago. He, like most people we spoke with outside the university, doesn’t see any way for this to be a positive thing for Long Beach athletes.
“I hate to see this break apart,” says Kredell, “and I hope they’ll reconsider, and see the impact it has, and how detrimental it will be to the community.” One thing that came up repeatedly in talking to members of the water polo community around the city is befuddlement as to how the school can expect to get young players to come to a new club, in the wake of a move that the incredibly insular world of SoCal water polo is so displeased about.
The personal frustration Kredell is experiencing is obvious—aside from his own ties with Long Beach State, Kredell was on the National Team with Arroyo, and Arroyo was in Kredell’s wedding, while Kredell’s wife was in Arroyo’s. As with nearly every level of this conflict, the people on both sides of it have a longstanding relationship. But Kredell got more emotional when talking about the city of Long Beach, and its tradition, a tradition he and the Shore Aquatics community fear is being thrown into jeopardy. “We call ourselves the Aquatic Capital of the World,” he says. “We’re supposed to be leaders. This is about the kids—that’s something Klaus Barth taught us, and something we believe.”
Whether the eviction will be permanent; whether Long Beach State and Gavin Arroyo’s Long Beach Water Polo Club will be a success; whether Shore’s move away from their historic home and into a smaller facility will hurt the club’s recent revitalization; all of those questions remain unanswered, perhaps for a long time to come. What’s obvious right now, however, is that barring a miraculous turn of events, the Long Beach sports community has been altered, in a significant way. And with Long Beach State removing a historic program from its grounds, with friendships and historic partnerships turning sour, and with yet another competitor climbing into the crowded Long Beach club polo world—it’s difficult to see a way that things have changed for the better.