Water sports enthusiasts hooked on kayak polo

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Children pedal pastel-colored boats, sailors catch a light breeze and lovers row side-by-side on a suspiciously calm Sunday on the pleasant waters of Shoreline Lake.

Suddenly, a jarring crash interrupts the tranquility.

Two kayakers, once 35 meters apart, completed a full-speed sprint with a head-on collision, a dangerous game of chicken where neither party decided to swerve. The boats connected. Loudly. Nobody was injured. The rowers were prepared for this, with caged helmets and padded life vests.

In fact, they looked forward to this all week.

“I’m about to sell you on this,” one of the rowers, Matt Summers, told an excited newcomer just before putting his boat into the water. “This is a contact sport. You can push people over.”

This is kayak polo, a sport in which a college freshman and a 60-something-year-old retiree can compete on the same field with equal levels of success.

It’s a sport in which a sixth grader and a sixth-grade teacher can — and quite happily do — drive their boats into one another in the name of athletic competition.

It’s a sport that athletes from the Bay Area Kayak Polo Club have dominated on the national stage.

The best in the country train here, at Shoreline Lake in Mountain View, once a week, and few passersby have any idea what’s going on.

“If you see someone kayaking out on the water, and they’re pretty good, we’ll be like, ‘Hey you should come join us,’ ” Summers said. “People on shore, a lot of the time, they come join. A lot of people ask questions.”

The requirements are quite simple: know how to kayak and know how to roll the boat (get yourself back above water quickly if the boat flips).

Once you’ve got that down, it becomes a game of physical strength and endurance, teamwork and strategy, a sort of hybrid between water polo and soccer, but played in kayaks.

“It looks like basketball,” an observer said on a recent Sunday.

There are five players per team, and the ball can only be moved by passing or shooting. You cannot paddle when in possession of the ball, and you only have five seconds to make a decision. Dribbling requires throwing the ball in front of you, then paddling to retrieve it.

Like soccer, there are formations. Different teams use different formations to capitalize on their strengths.

A goalkeeper is positioned underneath the net, which is 2 meters above the water and stands 1 meter high by 1½ meters wide (the sport originated in Europe and thus uses the metric system).

From there, a team might play with three defenders and one zonal player roaming along the outside. Or they could play with two defenders and two zonal players. Or a five-player man-marking system.

On offense, a team might use a pick-and-roll play to generate scoring opportunities from the outside, or position one forward player under the net to try to get the ball to them for a close-range shot, not dissimilar to basketball.

Though played on water, the playing area is referred to as a pitch. It is 35 meters long and 23 meters wide, so as soon as one team loses possession, it turns into a frenzy of full-speed kayakers sprinting towards the opposing goal.

“There are a lot of different ways to play,” said Tim Johnson, a team veteran who grew up in the United Kingdom but helped start the Bay Area club in 1997. “Different countries develop different tactics.”

There are maybe 20 people in the entire Bay Area who play regularly, and the best of the bunch travel all over the world — their kayak and oars in tow — to compete against players in other countries.

“We have a number of players who have played on the national team,” said Bay Area Kayak Polo Club captain Peter Hargreaves, a middle school teacher in San Leandro. “So our club is one of the higher clubs. We were often winning the U.S. championship or coming in second. A pretty good club.”