At the request of parents, coaches, athletes, and fans, we’re starting a new thread to discuss the influence of money, politics, geography, and other non-performance-based factors in the selection of athletes for ODP and national teams. Let’s use this thread (or similar threads created by others) to discuss these issues.
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Someone a few weeks ago, can’t remember the handle name, made reference to known people that were selected due to monetary incentives or family donations. I think we all know selections are made ahead of time for the overwhelming majority making the appearance of tryouts disingenuous, but the monetary piece I find interesting. It is not surprising whatsoever is the saddest part, even if untrue. There is clearly a heavy club bias at a minimum, and you better hope you were selected in the early days pre-puberty as you clearly have the upper hand through the rest of the years.
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PoloEnthusiast commenting on the Cadet ODP travel team selections:
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From calves of steel:
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Quoting from Sctrojanie:
@jeff what evaluation was done to determine that the request from “parents, coaches, athletes, and fans” (aka large shield) was valid? and was there anyone representing the other side of this issue?
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calvesofsteel,
You’re welcome to post your comments in this thread or another one you create. We’re not going to argue with you about whether it was appropriate to keep the focus of the initial thread on the accomplishments of the athletes who were selected to participate in the Cadet camp or to play on one of the travel teams.
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@jeff
Let’s be clear, I was not challenging the focus on the athletes, I was calling out the fact that a post was flagged and buried simply for being critical.
The reason this matters isn’t about arguing for the sake of it; it’s about whether this site is actually the open community it claims to be. When you state that you are not going to argue about the appropriateness of moving and flagging posts, you aren’t just ending a debate—you are signaling that valid community concerns about transparency aren’t worth the effort of a response.
Using the athlete’s accomplishments as a shield to deflect from valid questions about the selection process is a tired tactic that forces a false choice: that we can either celebrate the kids or ask hard questions, but not both. A truly healthy forum for water polo would welcome both.
Unfortunately, this has become a documented pattern of closing ranks whenever a conversation becomes uncomfortable or unwanted
https://waterpoloexchange.com/t/brian-flacks-stanford/1159/63
This site was meant to be the replacement for Water Polo Planet—the hub for all things water polo, good and bad.
If the priority remains sanitizing the narrative rather than hosting real dialogue, it will push more and more of us to r/waterpolo, which is seeming to be a much more open space for water polo.
I appreciate everything you have done for the community and I can voice my criticism at the same time
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calvesofsteel,
To be clear, the posts in question were moved from one thread to another to keep the focus of the initial thread on the athletes selected for the various cadet teams. No one is attempting to bury criticism of the selection process. You are free to question the selection process in this thread or another thread of your choosing. I wouldn’t call that a false choice. Moving forward, if a thread is started to recognize the accomplishments of age group and high school athletes, we intend to keep the focus of the thread on the athletes. It’s easy enough for you or others to start another thread.
Well said, I would add that this site, while valuable, absolutely sanitizes and buries issues that may make certain folks uncomfortable, depending on the issue at hand. That may work to hide uncomfortable truths from those who do not necessarily have access or awareness of what is actually going on. But I will tell you who is NOT fooled. The players. They are very aware of the arrangements, financial and otherwise, that impact what happens. It is one big “duh” to them.
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I’d like to offer my perspective and hopefully gain a deeper understanding on yours (and anyone else who has thoughts on this):
In this particular instance, we had an announcement for a USAWP team where the average athlete is an underclassman in HS and we had some replies on how money & politics influences selections. We made a decision to split the discussion on out-of-pool selection influence from the announcement itself.
I can help speak to why this thread was created and hopefully clear the air.
These are not the only factors that we consider but I’m trying to give you the most relevant context.
Our public discussions will show up in search engines, AI summaries, etc.
When we make decisions about this board, we also think about scenarios like:
- Some athlete on the team searches for the roster announcement and immediately scrolls to see insinuations that some members of the team were selected due to political or monetary reasons.
- Some athlete asks ChatGPT (or your favorite LLM) about their prospects of playing in college after being selected to a cadet team and they get a response like “It’s really great that you made a selection team. Here’s a WPEX discussion on why that’s good—but might not be the accomplishment you think it is”
I’m sure we can all think of other scenarios where it might be harmful to co-locate an announcement of a selection team with a discussion on how money and politics have influenced these selections and how it reflects on the deservedness of the athletes (who have likely not developed an “immune system” to being a publicly discussed person on the internet).
Additionally, I’d imagine that some of our users who wanted this thread to talk about the out-of-pool factors that go into roster selections are now frustrated because we’ve taken a tangent to talk about moderation.
With that framing, we made the decision to split parts of the announcement discussion.
A couple asks on my end.
I recognize that some of our users might disagree with the decision to split the discussion but I’m having a hard time seeing a compelling argument to the benefit of co-locating these discussions that overwhelming outweighs the negative.
Moving forward, it’d be helpful to our decision making process if you can help me understand what’s leading you to a different conclusion?
From your reply, I’m also not seeing why separating the celebration of these athletes from asking the hard questions amounts to ending a debate.
Could you please clarify why creating a dedicated thread on these hard questions ends the dialogue?
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You actually highlighted the topic for me. I never even saw the comments in the other thread.
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This sounds very reasonable and thoughtful to me.
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Indeed, moderating efforts will typically be at odds with the Streisand effect.
I think this is important to discuss so I’ll have the conversation on responsible moderation.
This works. 
My comment in the other thread wasn’t directed at anyone. It’s just that I never had to pay a dime for youth national team in my country. Here it’s where usawp makes a large chunk of their budget. That’s all I was saying.
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I am so happy that you are allowing this thread. My child played polo from 12 years of age through D1 college but was relegated to the practice squad regularly. We never understood why or how to get around being able to get exposure and assumed that money was involved. I think it’s worth stating that not everyone even has the “privilege” to donate to ensure their child gets a chance to seriously compete. Donations are still very inner circle and available to a select crowd.
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I think it’s very dangerous for anyone to insinuate that any player is where they are because of donations. With tha brush, you paint everyone. Certainly, not everyone is there for reasons other than merit
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Somebody on one of these threads did bring that up not long ago and said something along the lines that, “it is very well known by everybody, that players that are on National teams are there because of their parents donations’ A few people asked him how he knew that, and all he had for an answer was something like ’ everybody knows” . Other people commented, and it seemed like most people did not know, so making statement like “everybody knows” and “it’s a very well known fact” is BS. What everybody does know, is that you just pulled that out of somewhere that I can’t mention, and wanted to get peoples reactions
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You can see the donations on usawp and they match w players’ names. However that is part of being on the team (bringing in donations).
Any kid or family can hustle and get small donations.
My experience of playing and being a parent of d1 water polo is selections are based on talent … and a lot of coach connections. It’s the tight knight group of long timers making sure their personal club survives by getting their guys on the national team. Even the guy who runs national league has his kid on a team now. The group at the top look out for each other first, period.
Usawp also love guys who train together all year, helps them win and then make it seem like the odp program works.
Kids selected get so much more experience and training (especially internationally) and exposure. It’s such a huge, clear recruiting advantage to be on those cadet, youth and future teams. This is why parents and athletes are so passionate regarding this topic.
The only fix is to change the water polo mission statement. Volleyball states their mission is to grow the sport and each individual … water polo is to win at youth levels. Seems self-serving to those who wrote it.
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It was in the if you were the ceo of water polo thread and the guy there insinuated it was a well known and not a short list of players that essentially bought their way onto the men’s and women’s national teams.
Other people are saying the same thing and not naming names or saying to look up donations. I would think the burden of proof would be on the people saying these things? Is it possible? Yes, polo is somewhat of a country club sport. But please provide some solid evidence.