Water polo newcomers want to smash sport’s barriers for black players

Last week, the Gauteng Invitational Water Polo Tournament, South Africa’s largest water polo event, held from 9 to 12 April, featured 35 teams and more than 540 athletes. Among them, one newcomer made waves: the Panthers.

Formed at the start of the year, the Panthers are a collective aimed at reshaping who participates and succeeds in water polo. Built around a majority-black player squad, they are actively challenging the traditional barriers to entry in water polo, particularly access to swimming facilities and exposure to the sport.

The initiative was founded by friends Michaela Boaventura, Shakira January, Oluchi McMurray and Boati Motau. January and Motau represented South Africa at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

With visibility at the forefront of their mission, the four women entered a team in the Gauteng Invitational tournament to promote their name and purpose.

Despite being scattered around the country and only coming together on the eve of the tournament, the Panthers defied expectations. They surged to the quarterfinals, finishing a respectable sixth overall.

However, according to Boaventura, who spoke to Daily Maverick on behalf of the squad, the impact they made beyond the pool mattered most. “From the beginning, we said that we’re not playing for ourselves. We’re playing for the generation that walked before us and the people who are coming after us,” she said.

“We need to show people that they belong in the sport and there is a place for them in the sport, and to show other people that people of colour can be talented in the sport.”

Breaking barriers

Water polo in South Africa has a high barrier to entry because access to facilities and coaching is often limited to well-resourced schools and communities. For the Panthers, confronting this reality lies at the core of their mission.

“It’s actually not a people of colour problem. It’s more of a wealth problem, and unfortunately those things do go hand in hand in South Africa,” Boaventura said. “Think about your schools with the best water polo programmes. They are private schools, they get the top coaches and they pay the coaches the most money.”

She added that in environments with fewer resources, programmes struggle to survive. “Schools that are not like that and can’t afford those sorts of programmes, their programmes end up dying out or people don’t play for long.”

The knock-on effect is visible even at a competitive level, where teams often field the minimum number of black players and sometimes rely on borrowed players to meet quotas, according to Boaventura.

“In order for us to bridge the gap between people of colour and the wealth gap and all those sorts of barriers that are holding back South African water polo, really, from finding the best talent out there, we have to start from grassroots.”

Denied access

With such a focused goal, the women have faced a backlash, drawing criticism for being perceived as exclusionary.

“I think people often misunderstand the reason [quotas] are there is that there were no pools in apartheid [for black people] that were safe and well maintained,” Boaventura said. “It wasn’t a thing. So our parents weren’t really in the water. They weren’t really in those spaces. So, I can understand why to some people it feels unfair, but it kind of has to happen.”

The ultimate goal, she said, is development and upliftment for everyone. “The Panthers is for everyone. It’s the development of everyone, the development of the whole country. We’re just looking at those areas that are getting overlooked.”

Learn to polo

While their run at the Gauteng Invitational put the Panthers on the map, the team is more focused on creating tangible access points into water polo.

This is why they launched the “Learn to Polo” initiative. Based at St Dominic’s school in Boksburg, the programme introduces young players, many of whom may not have strong swimming backgrounds, to the fundamentals of the sport in an environment designed to be accessible and inclusive.

“Learn to Polo is just like normal club training, if I can call it that, but it’s targeted at teaching people who maybe don’t have the strongest swimming skills or don’t know how to play water polo,” Boaventura explained. “That’s where the real work of the Panthers is actually happening.”

Although high-performance camps do exist, they are often hosted at well-resourced schools and not always in reach. “You learn so much, but it’s not very accessible for grassroots development,” she said. “It’s not focused on the bottom up. There are now programmes such as AfriPolo which are helping, and every now and then provincial programmes will try something out, but we want something that’s a bit more sustainable.

“We’ve just got to make it more accessible for everybody. If our search pool becomes bigger, the amount of talent statistically will go higher and we will find hidden gems in the rough.”

Still in their early stages, the Panthers have already made an impact. Theirs is an initiative they believe will change the face of water polo in South Africa. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.