I hear the splash before I see it. I turn and sprint toward the floating yellow object of my desire. I have a clear path.
Or so I think. Suddenly my friend Sam comes in fast from my right. As I reach for the yellow ball, he crashes into my kayak, his foam-covered bow pushing me off to the side. He scoops it up and, in one smooth motion, hurls it past the goalie’s raised paddle.
Welcome to kayak polo. It’s the weirdest and most addictive thing you might ever do in a kayak. And possibly the best paddling training you’ll ever have.
Inside the weird world of kayak polo
You’d be forgiven for thinking I’m making this all up. Kayak polo sounds ridiculous: take a few short kayaks, a ball, two goals at the end of a pool, and try to score goals.
It definitely feels ridiculous when we try to explain why our club, Portland Kayak Polo, wants to rent a pool from the local recreation district. The manager furrows his brow and waits for the punchline. But for all its weirdness, kayak polo brings most things we crave as paddlers: camaraderie, exercise and skill development.
Like water polo, kayak polo is a team game. Five people on a side try to get a ball into the goal hung over the water. It’s a lot like floating hockey. You can pass the ball or “dribble it” by tossing it in front of you, maneuvering past the defense to get in close for a good shot. Some people play in specialized polo kayaks—short slalom-style boats with padded ends—but most play is pretty casual, so we always have a few folks in standard whitewater kayaks.
You can use your kayaks to bulldoze other kayaks out of your way near the goal. With people and paddles in close quarters, helmets with face shields are the other essential equipment, along with paddles with blunt or taped edges. The rules are otherwise similar to soccer. In advanced games, and for people who can roll, it’s legal to push people over who have the ball, as long as there’s no paddler on the other side.
There’s nothing like maneuvering with nine other boats in a pool, pushing past each other to get to a ball, to hone your boat handling.
I started playing one winter to improve my skills, and I quickly found I loved the sport, especially since my pickup basketball “career” ended two knee surgeries ago. There’s nothing like maneuvering with nine other boats in a pool, pushing past each other to get to a ball, to hone your boat handling. And it’s all sprint paddling, back and forth, offense to defense, until a break when there’s a goal, an out of bounds or a substitution. It’s great paddling cardio.After jockeying around in kayak polo, a whitewater rapid or rock garden with no other paddlers trying to knock you out of position can seem calm by comparison.
Our Portland club numbers about 15 to 20 members, with similar clubs in Seattle, Bellingham, Bend, the San Francisco Bay Area, Austin, Boston, New York, Richmond, Edmonton, Victoria and Toronto. Almost everyone I play with is also a river or sea kayaker.
The small, fringe nature of the sport means clubs know they need to welcome newcomers to survive. That means being patient as people learn the rules and strategies and get used to mixing whitewater and polo boats. Experienced players know to tamp down their competitive instincts.
So now my kayak shed holds a weird-looking boat with padded ends and two sea kayaks, a whitewater kayak and my partner’s all-purpose Romany. All winter, I look forward to blowing off my stress by chasing a ball up and down a pool and getting pushed over by my friends. When we shift to playing outdoors in the summer, polo has more competition for my time, between the call of the river, the sea and weekend camping getaways.But when I do get in my sea kayak, I know I can sprint a lot faster when I need to make it through the surf zone. And it’s easier to roll if I’m not also worried about hanging onto the ball.
Neil Schulman plays with Portland Kayak Polo, where he keeps trying to invent absurd rules and get other people to follow them. Nobody does.
This article was published in Issue 74 of Paddling Magazine. Serious contender for the world’s weirdest sport. | Feature photo: Neil Schulman
