North Springs Water Polo

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North Springs Spartans Water Polo wins state trophy

The North Springs A Team celebrates victory (Courtesy Fulton County Schools )

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BY ALEX EWALT

Sandy Springs is now home to a titlewinning water polo program.

With the North Springs A and B teams seeded highly heading into the Georgia High School Water Polo Association (GHSWPA) championship tournament, which was held the first weekend of October, the Spartans B team tore through the bracket to hoist the Division III state trophy in the team’s first year of existence.

“Our B team made huge strides throughout the season,” Head Coach Julie Ferris said. “We’ve been looking the past few years to have enough players to have two teams. I started the program in 2009, but until last year, we were only able to fill one team. And thankfully with the past two years, we’ve gotten more interest and more players.”

The B team was seeded third heading into the tourney and defeated the Forsyth B team to advance to the semis, where it met the No. 2 seed APS (Atlanta Public Schools) B, a team the Spartans lost to 15-6 in the season’s opening game. But the Spartans flipped the script on their semis opponents and defeated them 14-6 to advance to the finals, where the team knocked off Wildcats C, 12-5.

And the Spartans A team had a banner year in its own right. That squad won the Division II regular-season championship with eight experienced seniors, and though the Spartans faltered in the semifinals, they finished the tourney in third place.

The North Springs teams are co-ed, and both draw from North Springs High School as well as its feeder school, Sandy Springs Middle. The program also features players from Holy Innocents, St. Francis, and Roswell High School.

“We’re a club sport in Georgia so it’s a little bit different than varsity,” Ferris said. “We’re not under the GHSA, and so the clubs that are involved in the league generally pull from multiple schools. So we are not officially a school sport, but most of our kids go to North Springs.”

The programs have grown a lot over the past 13 years, when Ferris started the program partly to get some of her high school swimmers more time in the pool outside of swim season. Ferris started out as swim coach at North Springs when she joined the faculty out of college in 2003. She swam competitively at Brookwood in Snellville and even began coaching summer swim leagues when she was still in high school.

“The president of the (water polo) coaches association for the state pitched it to us at meetings,” Ferris said. “He would tell us you can get your kids in the water earlier and get some more hours in the pool, and I thought that sounded like a good idea. So I found eight kids who were willing to do it and in 2009 we started a team. We didn’t win a game, but we had fun and we learned. And at that point, I had really no water polo experience, so I went to other people’s practices, I brought other coaches in to help and show us what to do, and over the years I’ve had multiple people come in to help.”

Ferris coaches the teams these days with Josh Beck, a former St. Pius X water polo player who also coaches other club teams in the area.

Zach Eisenstat, a North Springs soph-

B Team players prepare for a game.

omore who is in his second season in the program and plays the “driver” position on the B team, agreed that the eventual state champions made huge strides this fall.

“Going through practices this year, I remembered how it was last season with all the seniors teaching me all these skills I didn’t know,” Eisenstat said. “Now I was teaching it to the new players. And in games, if somebody messed up, you told them how to fix it, and every time on the next play they would correct it and we would score. And it was just like this awesome feeling of watching people fixing their mistakes and the team getting better and better every single time.”

Eisenstat had an entry point to the sport, as his father played high school water polo in California, which is home to powerhouse college teams and intense youth development programs. And one of the A team’s top seniors and its captain, Matty Scalo, got a taste of that high-level West Coast competition when he attended a boarding camp for his second semester of junior year. Scalo trained and played at the 6-8 Sports Water Polo Development System based in California, which takes applicants from all over the country and features top players who are looking to play in NCAA competition or even make a run at the national team.

“It was a lot of fun, going from being in Georgia and not being able to practice all that much to being in California and spending most of my time in the water working on my skills and the game,” said Scalo, who tried multiple sports over his youth but found one that stuck in water polo when he joined the Spartans as a freshman. Scalo plays the “hole set” position for the Spartans offense, a sort of pivot position in front of the opposing team’s goal. In water polo, there are six “outfield” positions and a goalie.

At the highest level, the sport is aggressive, fast, and as competitive as any of the more-established sports in the Southeast.

“It’s super, super physical,” Scalo said of the competition level in California, noting that the intensity isn’t as high in North Springs’ club league but that the quality is improving year to year. “To me, it’s more physical than football could ever be.”

B team players Asher Maurice, Thomas Bykat, Adam Greenstein, and Zach Eisenstat.

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