I play water polo and have always heard water polo rides are abundant and easy to get because of the lack of people playing, how true is this?
There are far more HS water polo players than roster spots in college.
There are around 50 DI/II men’s and women’s water polo teams with an average roster of just over 20. Water polo is an equivalency sport (partial scholarships allowed), and fully funded NCAA scholarship allowance is 4.5/team…so most water polo players are receiving a relatively small, if any, athletic scholarship. Only top tier players would be considered for a full scholarship…and offering one player a full scholarship would leave only 3.5 scholarships left (if fully funded) to allocated to the other 20 or so players.
If you are interested in playing water polo, fill out the online recruiting questionnaires at schools you are interested in and contact the head coach, as well as assistant coaches. Here is LMU’s recruiting questionnaire: https://questionnaires.armssoftware.com/919d75c65a54
Access the NCAA water polo recruiting timeline here: http://www.ncaa.org/student-athletes/resources/recruiting-calendars/division-i-and-ii-recruiting-calendars
There are also water polo teams in D3 and CCCAA (Calif community colleges), neither of which offer athletic scholarships
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I’d imagine full rides are few and far between. On the women’s side, each school can offer up to 8 scholarships but roster sizes are typically between 16 and 25 so even a fully funded school only has between 1/3 to 1/2 scholarship per player. And during our process we found that many of the D1 schools aren’t even fully funded for water polo.
We just went through the water polo recruiting process with D20. She began the recruiting process by sending emails and highlights the summer before her junior year. These generated a steady stream of email correspondence, but she wasn’t a top recruit so interest was friendly but not aggressive. Ultimately the continued emails and highlights (updated a couple times) led to several official visits and even a few mentions of scholarship offers from D1/D2 schools that she didn’t visit. Ultimately we never progressed far enough with the D1/D2 schools to find out the dollar amount they would have offered her in scholarships because she applied ED and was accepted to her top choice D3 school where the coach’s support was probably just enough to get her accepted.
One general statement about water polo recruitment is that it felt more laid back and just later than we expected from reading about the process in other sports. While the big name recruits may get snapped up early, there are programs that are fairly slow in their recruiting and my daughter received multiple emails as late as the past month stating there was still scholarship money available for her if she was interested in applying. One other surprise, as D20 was beginning to line up a few official visits her top choice school had still never responded to any email correspondence from the past year plus. She went ahead and sent a letter snail mail and within a week or two she received an email inviting her on an OV. This coach warned her that he didn’t have any slots at this D3 school but he would advocate for her with admissions. Ultimately she was accepted with SAT scores that placed her in the bottom 25th percentile so it was either coach’s support or her strong essays that ultimately earned her a spot.