Consolidated

To those who’ve indicated at least some interest in participating in our consolidated high school team effort this fall, here’s our first update. We’re calling it the Central Texas Consolidated High School Waterpolo team. We’re starting to solidify our plans since there is big interest in fielding consolidated teams from Dallas to Austin to Houston, which is great news for our athletes who want to play high school water polo this fall but don’t have a UIL team to play for. Here’s a brief update on what you can expect based on what we know so far.

First, if you know of any other athletes looking for a team please ask them to fill out this form and/or contact me.

Participating Teams

• CenTex Consolidated boys (AquaTex)
• Dallas Consolidated boys (Pegasus)
• Houston Rebels Consolidated boys (Viper Pigeons)
• Cedar Park HS Club boys (Zilla)
• Zilla girls
• Zilla boys

Our roster, in general

• Aaron Gordon, Vandegrift
• Cash Brown, Vista Ridge
• Jacob Gerakos, Lake Belton
• Jackson Place, Vista Ridge
• Chase Wadley, East View
• Tristan Chamas, Vandegrift
• Ava Chamas, Vandegrift
• Santhiago Márquez, Cedar Park
• William Lunsford, McNeil
• Cayden Maguire, Vandegrift
• August Nordstedt, St. Andrew’s
• Kaden Wiggans, home school

Competition Schedule

We are fortunately already on the calendar for a tournament in Round Rock (at the RRAC) on September 8-9. The teams involved in that tourney are, tentatively:

• Round Rock
• Westlake (Boys only)
• Anderson
• Austin
• Westwood
• Hays
• Lehman
• Waco Midway (Friday Only)
• Alamo Heights (Friday only)
• Canyon
• CenTex Consolidated (Boys Only)
• Houston Rebels Consolidated (Boys Only)

The format of the tourney is TBD but you can likely expect it to be in festival format. That is, 2-3 games, no championship bracket.

As for the rest of the fall schedule, please review it via this calendar. Events prefaced with a question mark are placeholders for now. The schedule has generally been compiled in a way that keeps other events in mind (SATs, USAWP tourneys, etc.). But if you are aware of any conflicts let me know. As you’ll see we should expect to travel to Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio for weekend tournaments.

Training

First, since we have athletes from a couple different clubs, your athlete’s priority is to continue practicing with them through the fall. As for AquaTex’s high school training schedule this fall, it is still tentative but athletes can expect something like monday and wednesday evenings; saturday and sunday mornings, with weekend practices being the most important for this program so we can get as many athletes training together as possible. So, in general, we’d strongly suggest attending your primary club practices on weeknights, and then heading to Micki Krebsbach on weekends for training. We will obviously not train on days when we are competing.

Communications

We’ve set up a GroupMe already that we’ll begin using more regularly. If you haven’t joined please do and add your athletes since it will be a family-friendly communications group (email me for the link to the group). If you’re unfamiliar with GroupMe, you can opt-out any time.

I’ve also used an email communications tool formerly knows as Sendinblue, now known as Brevo. You will likely receive email from that service in the future so let it thru those spam filters! Again, you can opt-out of that mailing list at any time.

Gear

Plans are to have a team tee-shirt available for online purchase very soon. We can add other gear as well based on your input.

Ordering team suits is possible but getting late. We have two vendors in mind: RYTE Sport can do one-off suit ordering directly to your preferred address in two weeks or so. The other, CounterPolo, is very inexpensive, has high quality suits, but only allows bulk orders and has a two month wait time. So, our athletes are welcome, even encouraged to wear their club OR former high school team suits to better shame those programs for no longer offering water polo… We’ll be using some pretty generic, unbranded competition caps, FYI.

Coaches

I’m planning on heading up this team this fall but, time permitting, will be encouraging our coaches Barbara Lanier and Matt Braun to help as well. They are both highly experienced coaches with Division I playing experience. Coach Babs led a high school team in Michigan and Matt was a certified youth coach in the UK where he played professionally.

That’s all for now. It’s an exciting time for our high school athletes and we’re looking forward to working with you to make the fall a great one.