Today, we’re introducing the “Coach’s Corner,” a new feature that will include columns written by current and former water polo coaches. The coaches contributing to this endeavor are doing so on their own time as a service to the water polo community and deserve our thanks. We hope to post columns throughout the year. While we work on the formatting and structure of the “Coach’s Corner,” the thread will be read-only.
Our first column is written by Brian Flacks, the coach of the Stanford men’s water polo team since 2022 and the coach at Harvard-Westlake from 2011 through 2021. Brian, a Harvard-Westlake graduate, became Harvard-Westlake’s coach at the age of 23. During his 11 years at Harvard-Westlake, Harvard-Westlake won four California Interscholastic Federation Southern Section Open Division (or its equivalent) championships. While at Harvard-Westlake, Brain coached, among many others, two water polo Olympians (Ben Hallock and Johnny Hooper), a third member of the U.S. senior national team (George Avakian), and two other 1st team college All-Americans (Felix Brozyna-Vilim and Evan Rosenfeld). Avakian won three NCAA championships at Cal, Brozyna-Vilim and Rosenfeld each won two at UCLA, Hallock won one at Stanford, and Hooper won one at Cal.
For more information about Brian’s water polo background, please see Brian Flacks - Stanford Cardinal - Official Athletics Website.
Here is Brian’s column:
I first met Jeff close to a decade ago on the Harvard-Westlake pool deck at an Elite Eight tournament. At that point in my career, I was already familiar with the work he’d done with Water Polo Planet. Like a lot of young coaches, I used Water Polo Planet as my go-to source for all things water polo news.
I’ll admit I haven’t spent a ton of time on message boards since those early days. Coaching, raising two kids, and the unnecessary noise of the message boards will do that. But I’m glad Jeff has kept at it. What I’ve always appreciated about Jeff is that he genuinely cares about our sport and about getting exposure to the athletes and teams that deserve it. He puts his name on his work, and his focus has always been on truth-seeking and doing right by water polo.
While there are parts of these message boards that I am not a huge fan of, I do appreciate that these online communities bring together some of the most passionate people in our sport. People who want to talk, debate, and think deeply about the game we all love. And the people like Jeff who are doing that work deserve credit and support. So when he asked me to contribute to a Coach’s Corner, it was an easy yes.
Jeff asked me to write about the differences between high school and college water polo. Before I get into specifics, I want to say this: I’m a huge believer that the values and work ethic that make any organization successful translate from one level to the next. My hope is always that the same things that made my teams successful at the high school level continue to drive success at the college level. That said, there are definitely some differences, and I’m happy to talk through a few that might interest people. In no particular order…
Schedule and Volume
I’ve always been ambitious and wanted to coach at the highest level. Because of that, my schedule has always been busy. When I was coaching high school water polo, I was also running LA Premier Water Polo Club, coaching at Olympic Club, and working with USA Youth and Junior National Teams and the Academy. Easily 45 of 52 weekends a year I was on deck, and I was coaching five nights a week. For an elite-level high school kid playing for a top club and high school program in Southern California, those athletes are playing 50-plus games before the high school season even starts.
College is a completely different animal. In the offseason, the NCAA has strict rules that break your year into segments:
In the winter quarter, January through March, the NCAA limits you to eight hours of training a week, only four of which can be skill training in the pool and prohibits you from playing in any games. That’s roughly four one-hour practices a week compared to the two hours a day we were doing consistently year-round at Harvard-Westlake/Premier.
In the spring quarter, starting around April, we move to 20 hours a week, which is on par to what we were doing at the high school and club level. But in college, you only get four play dates, meaning you can play games on only four days the entire quarter. If you’re playing two games a day, that’s eight allowable games over nearly three months. So in the first six months of the calendar year, a college player might get about eight games total. As I mentioned, at the high school and club level, that same kid would have already played about 30.
There’s probably a happy medium between the two. But I can tell you that I do think the lack of opportunity to play games at the college level during the offseason has really hurt the development of our athletes who aspire to compete at the Olympic and international level. I’m excited about the future of things like the National League that hopefully open up opportunities for our college guys to play more games in the offseason, both for development and because, at the end of the day, players (and coaches) want to play in games.
Intensity of a College Season
Over the summer, there are actually a lot of similarities. Colleges are often playing as club teams and training all summer, anywhere from 20 to 25 hours a week. There are no strict NCAA guidelines over the summer, so you build your game and get your reps in.
Where college is most notably different for me is what happens after summer. In high school, we had a slow build from the end of August to November. While each game was important, we always assumed we were going to be in the top playoff division, and we were really building towards playing our best water polo in November.
At Stanford, the moment the season starts, every game is basically do or die. For MPSF schools like UCLA, USC, Cal, and Stanford, you need to win your conference for the automatic bid (arguably, in the MPSF, almost tougher to do than to win the NCAA championship) or be one of the next two best teams to get an at-large bid. Because the Conference tournament isn’t till the end of the year, each of us is jockeying to make sure we are in position to get an at-large bid in case we don’t win the Conference tournament.
Every year I’ve been at Stanford, the difference between the first team out and last team in the tournament has come down to one game, and it’s been decided on the final day of the season. In each of my first four seasons at Stanford, over ten of our games during the season have been against USC, Cal, and UCLA. For example, in our 2025 season, we played USC, UCLA, and Cal eleven times, well over a third of our schedule. And not a single team in the MPSF lost to a team outside of the MPSF, making us the clear top four teams in the country.
Take a step back and think about college football, where teams play 13 to 16 games, and every result matters. Now imagine doubling that season length and playing the top four or five teams in the country for over a third of your schedule. That’s what this is…
From the end of August when the season starts to the beginning of December, unlike high school, we have to try to win every Saturday and Sunday. There is no building to the end, and no “we had a bad weekend.” If you don’t win, your chances of even getting to play for a championship plummet.
While this is intense, this is what makes the college season so special and exactly the type of environment I always dreamed of coaching in.
As a small piece of commentary, I’ve always wondered if it might actually benefit water polo to move closer to the football model. One game a week, play on Friday/Saturday nights before the college football games, and play a 13-16 game regular season with a playoff. The current model of 25 to 30 games is a lot given the physicality and growing competitiveness of this sport…I’ll let the message boards debate over this one.
Recruiting
While I think most people believe that every private school in the Southern Section recruits, in high school you’re actually not allowed to (I can hear half of the message board audibly grumbling right now). You are essentially limited by the players that live near your school. In college, we are recruiting players from every corner of the world, and at Stanford, it’s arguably the most important part of my job.
I got hired at Stanford at an unusual time. The class I was coming in with had already been recruited by John Vargas, the previous coach. So I came into a program that had already been built by someone else. What I’ve learned since then is that the most important thing in my job, by far, is bringing in the right people. And I don’t just mean recruiting athletes. I mean coaches, staff, everyone in your program. Getting the right people in the building, the ones that fit your system and are aligned with what you’re trying to build, matters more than anything else.
The college recruiting landscape has changed a lot in the last six years, especially after COVID in 2020. The first thing, and I think the most notable and underappreciated, is that Zoom became normalized. With the invention of things like the iPhone and digital video, athletes already had the ability to send video to college coaches. But the normalcy of Zoom completely changed the level of exposure college coaches had to players around the globe. I might be dating myself, but it wasn’t all that long ago when athletes had to burn grainy videos onto DVDs and ship them across the world and jump on phone calls. Now athletes can schedule meetings once or even more times a week, coaches have access to live streams and athlete databases, and players can send film straight from their iPhones.
Second, the U.S. National Team has improved and we had a number of USA players break through on the world stage (Ben Hallock, Max Irving, Alex Bowen, Hannes Daube, etc.). Having these guys playing international water polo in the early 2020s worked in two ways: it put the USA on the map as a place that is developing elite-level talent, and I think the connections they made with international players offered those players insight and exposure directly to colleges here.
Third, when COVID hit and most athletes lost their season, the NCAA granted all collegiate athletes at the time an extra year of eligibility (instead of having four years to compete, athletes were now given five). In response, many universities created post bacc and graduate certificate opportunities. These programs offered student-athletes with an extra year of eligibility after they had finished their undergraduate degree additional avenues beyond the typical graduate programs to enroll in their universities. And now, well after the last of the COVID-year athletes have graduated, many of these post bacc and certificate programs have remained, making it much easier for athletes to transfer if they still have an extra year of eligibility (this happens most often if the athlete redshirted as a freshman or got injured during their college career).
Finally, you throw in the craziness of the transfer portal and the increased number of athletes looking to transfer. All of these changes have made recruiting a much bigger part of the job. You’re recruiting more players, recruiting throughout the year, and trying to find systems to sift through the massive volume of interest. This part of the job is significantly different from my experience as a high school coach, and it’s also the part that has evolved and changed the most since I’ve started. Making sure that we do our due diligence and bring in the right people is incredibly important to me. And as the landscape evolves, I find myself placing more value on getting it right than ever before.
As another piece of side commentary, the roster limits have me concerned about the future development of high school athletes. With 24 roster spots, if you do some quick math, that’s about six spots a year. If teams are picking up a couple of transfers and a couple of international players, it really limits the number of spots available for domestic high school kids. At Stanford, we’re a unique place where we’re going to continue to depend on the high school senior. Maybe we get a transfer here or there, and we’ll certainly still be active in the portal looking for top talent, but that’s going to be the exception. If we are going to be successful at the Farm, we are going to need to develop 18-year-old domestic talent for the foreseeable future. And honestly, the development of talent is what I enjoy most about coaching and what I think I’m best at.
Tactics, Scouting, and Depth
I think one of the things people want to know the most is whether tactics are different at the college level. Honestly, the higher up you get, the more nuanced everything gets. The level of the players is higher, so they’re more capable of running more complex systems and plays. But I really think the biggest difference at this level is that the players are doing the really basic things much more consistently and at a much higher level than the players below them. I would encourage any young player that wants to get to this level to not focus on developing some super special shot or something incredibly unique. The most important thing you can do is master the fundamentals and execute them under pressure, over and over again.
As far as scouting and preparing for opponents goes, since as I explained earlier it is so difficult to even make the NCAA tournament in college, you’re generally doing everything you can to win every single game, and it’s nearly impossible to hold much back. Obviously, there are a few things you might save for December, a timeout play, an after-a-goal play, etc., but when you’re playing for your life every weekend, you’re throwing nearly the entire kitchen sink at every game. In addition, there’s a lot less turnover of coaches and athletes at the college level than in high school. You’re getting exposure to the same coaches and the same players over and over again, and you’re watching them play against other amazing players. It’s tough to hide anything, but it’s also one of the fun parts about coaching in college: you have to continue to be creative and iterate on what you’ve done in the past if you’re going to survive. At the high school level, since most of your games weren’t that close and honestly just making the playoff divisions was significantly easier, you could save a lot more for the end of the season. For NBA fans, a high school season is akin to watching the NBA regular season versus the playoffs. The level of intensity and effort from the regular season to the playoffs is drastically different, so much so that it sometimes looks like an entirely different team.
This is also where depth of your roster comes into play. One of the things I’ve tried to build at Stanford is more depth. This is because it’s both significantly more challenging to scout a team that has a lot more players, but also, the season is so physical, so hard, that to be able to compete for three months at that level, you have to have at least 12-14 guys that can play at a very high level. And it’s not just the season. It’s the singular game, too. The game has gotten so physical, so intense, that we’re moving more and more towards something like hockey shifts, where guys are playing at a really high intensity for shorter amounts of time rather than one player playing almost a full game.
Looking Ahead
If you know me, you know that as we enter our 20-hour segment through the first week of December, I become quite a recluse, but I want to leave you with two thoughts on the future of water polo, and both are about my excitement for the college game.
First, as many of you may already know, the House case that added roster limits also removed scholarship limits, which means schools can now offer as many scholarships as they want on their roster. In the short term, I do worry/believe that this could make the playing field a bit uneven for a few years until we stabilize and find an equilibrium. However, long term I’m optimistic that the increased amount of athletic scholarship money is going to drive an influx of high-level, talented players and the overall college game and parity of college water polo will reach new heights. My sentiment is that the desire from international athletes to attend American colleges and the increase in aid will only make the college game a lot stronger and more competitive (just take a look at what Princeton and Fordham have done for the past few years. And while Princeton doesn’t have athletic scholarships, they have highly competitive international need-based aid).
Second, and what I think is much more important, is that I believe we are at an inflection point with Olympic sports and water polo in college. For many years, we have been able to survive due to the revenue generated by sports like basketball and football. But with the rising costs to fund those sports, including the House case that now allows institutions to do revenue sharing with their athletes, I think Olympic sports are at a point where we are going to be forced to find a financially sustainable model, something we have avoided for way too long. And I don’t say this as doom and gloom at all. If anything, I say this with honest excitement, because I believe passionately in the water polo community. Being forced to find a financially sustainable model that isn’t dependent on football is going to push us to create better leagues and a better product for our fans so that we can generate revenue to continue to support college water polo.
I hope to see many of you out at the games this fall. Go Card!