In 2008, Michael Rosenthal graduated from high college in Miami and was arguably the best water polo participant in the kingdom. He had just been named a first-team All-American; his group had gained the nation name, and his place of birth Herald had called him the Water Polo Player of the Year. But, Rosenthal says, “I wasn’t a top recruit. I was an unknown.” He provides, “I’m now not saying I was off-the-radar. But the satisfactory water polo player in Florida, on a given year, is probably an average player in California.”
The Golden State is the hotbed of American water polo. The high-quality gamers come from where the top college teams live: Stanford, Cal Berkeley, UCLA, or USC. As Rosenthal went through the recruiting technique, a few of his former coaches linked him with Jovan Vavic, the mythical USC water polo educator. You should call Vavic the John Wooden of water polo—and is Geno Auriemma, too. He coached both the guys and girls’ teams; in 1995, he gained 16 national titles (10 with the men, six with the ladies) and 15 National Coach of the Year awards.
That intended, Vavic should recruit nearly everybody he desired. USC also gave him leeway to signal many of those recruits, precisely at the guys’ facet. In water polo recruiting, there are just a few constraints. The NCAA mandates that teams can best carry sixteen players inside the championship event, and the variety of scholarships is constant, too—men’s groups have 4.5, and girls’ teams have 8. However, the NCAA no longer has a maximum roster restriction. So teams can bring as many gamers as they want, as long as the college complies with Title IX regulations requiring stability among the variety of male and female athletes inside the powerful application. Often, Vavic could carry in hordes of male recruits, seemingly to a peer who might pan out.
In 2008, Vavic signed 22 rookies, bumping the USC guys’ water polo roster to as many as fifty-one people, which dwarfed the maximum of other colleges. Only six learners acquired gambling time that year. The different 16, such as Rosenthal, redshirted.
Now, why might Vavic convey a roster that massive? Well, know this: Everything about his program had a motive. Vavic regularly drew from coaches his favorite: Phil Jackson. Tom Osborne. Wooden. “He’d take these philosophies,” Rosenthal says, “after which placed his very own Eastern European water polo twist on it.”
As a young man, Vavic performed water polo professionally in vintage Yugoslavia before coming to Southern California in 1984. After arriving at USC as an assistant in the early ’90s, he started building his education fashion, borrowing techniques from different sports activities. He shaped a management council with his maximum dependence on gamers and empowered them to police their teammates. He made gamers evaluate themselves before the crew and attend everyday meditation sessions. He studied film obsessively and changed into continuously coming up with revolutionary play designs. He’d distribute a packet of plays for various situations for every recreation. Like many successful coaches, he also became paranoid. Vavic might practice his satisfactory plays in the summer and then shop them for the NCAA tournament. “We constantly had exact plays, nearly like a soccer crew,” says Matthew Burton, another member of that incoming freshman elegance in 2008. “That became very special from various coaches in the collegiate device.”
Vavic would work with his pinnacle gamers at one pool stop while his assistants schooled the redshirts at the other so they could finally contribute. Then Vavic might weed out the weaker players with his grueling practices, grating coaching fashion, and hours of “punishment” swims. The coaches additionally tasked the redshirts with doing abnormal jobs around the pool. They’d assist with installing the desires, refilling the Gatorade coolers, practicing, and playing video games. “We don’t have ball boys, always,” says Burton. “But that’s kind of what their position became.”
During a few games, Rosenthal recollects that the redshirts could sit together inside the stands, dress in USC gear, and act because of the team’s cheering phase. “We would cheer like maniacs the entire sport,” Rosenthal says. As a result, it might not have been easy to decide who became a member of the crew and who wasn’t.
Last week, Jovan Vavic was arrested as part of a nationwide college admissions bribery scandal and was directly fired. He is accused of signing two faux recruits—who had never performed competitive water polo—to assist them in gaining admission to USC as an alternative to bribes from their mother and father. According to an affidavit filed by federal prosecutors, Vavic worked with Donna Heinel, a USC partner athletic director, and a man named Rick Singer, who operated a university counseling business and a purported charity business enterprise in Southern California.
According to the affidavit, Singer could create an “athletic profile” for the student, complete with falsified stats, doctored photos, or even fake awards. Then Vavic or Heinel, accepting cash from Singer, would present the profile, alongside the ones of real water polo recruits, to a USC admissions subcommittee that reviewed incoming athletes.
It seems USC took Vavic at his phrase. This isn’t always that unusual inside the collegiate water polo global. One former D-I educator says that after submitting his roster, his superiors customarily did it, apparently without vetting the names. Not every faculty has the time or resources to conduct historical assessments on small-recreation recruits. There is no centralized water polo recruiting database or Rivals.com for pool sports. The pinnacle players in you. S. Might also know each other, but mid-tier gamers can come from everywhere. Vavic traveled the arena seeking to unearth new skills, so it changed into the potential he might convey to some unknown recruits. According to courtroom files, Heinel once defended a faux hire to the admissions office, claiming Vavic had observed the boy at a tournament in Serbia.
Vavic might be convincing, too. In one case, he emailed a USC athletics administrator that such faux recruits “will be the quickest participant on our team” and that he may want to swim 50 yards in 20 seconds—two seconds quicker than his quickest gamers. “This youngster can fly,” Vavic wrote. Of course, it becomes a complete fabrication. USC admitted the boy just two days later.
It’s uncertain whether or not his faux recruits ever saw the pool or in which the cash paid on their behalf—the going fee seemed to be between $220,000 and $250,000—ended up. In addition, Singer allegedly made private college training payments for Vavic’s youngsters. But Singer additionally instructed a figure, in a wiretapped communication, that he believed Vavic frequently used the cash to “subsidize” the salaries of his assistant coaches, who did so much to keep his dynasty going. (None of Vavic’s assistants have been charged.)
It appeared like a suitable crime. If one of these fake recruits had left the team, no one might’ve observed because Vavic’s teams, specifically the guy’s team, had a lot of attrition. Players would always depart, sad with their gambling time, bored stiff over Vavic’s education fashion, or certainly extra interested in specializing in faculty. “I’d say there were typically 5 to six men that [dropped out] every year,” Burton says.
Remember, Rosenthal was one of sixteen freshmen who redshirted in 2008. Of those sixteen, the most effective Rosenthal and others remained on the crew four years later, as fifth-12 months seniors. They ended up leaving USC, having won five consecutive countrywide championships.
