Brooklyn Water Polo's Guardian Angel

The story of Brooklyn water polo begins with Carl Quigley ’75, Associate Athletic Director at St. Francis Brooklyn, who for 34 years (1975-2009) was head coach of the Terrier men’s water polo team, consistently one of the East’s best.

Ove the last 40 years Quigley has helped launch the careers of hundreds of young athletes, both with his college team and through Brooklyn Heights St. Francis Water Polo (BHSF), the successor to the youth club he founded in 1979.

Quigley spoke recently about coaching the Terriers, his age group club, the challenges of growing water polo in New York City and his hopes for a sport he has devoted his life to.

“I started [the youth team] as a template for me to become a better,” said Quigley, who launched the club in 1979. “I felt I was deficient in a lot of areas when I first began [coaching] in terms of learning the game from the ground up.”

Armed with a masters degree in special education from Long Island University, the Brooklyn native put his newfound knowledge to good use.

“In working with handicapped kids,” Quigley said, “I was able to break skills down to minute levels; see what the act of throwing was, or what the act of swimming was, how I could get young people to improve through practice and through rote [learning] to get better at both swimming and water polo.”

One innovation was to have Terrier players coach young athletes whose knowledge of the sport was limited.

“Forcing them to articulate the nuances of the game made them better athletes; they were forced to think about how it was to throw, to do a drive, to take a shot,” Quigley explained about an experiment that proved successful. Bosko Stankovic, a native of Serbia and All-American player for St. Francis (2010-14) has been BHSF’s head coach the past two years.

“No matter what level they were at, because they were forced to verbalize—whether they be from Serbia, Croatia, California or here in New York—it forced them to explain what came so naturally to them.”

The spirit of “paying it forward,” as Quigley described it, is true to the college’s Franciscan tradition. In turn, the sport has expanded from the college’s Brooklyn Heights location to Sheepshead Bay, Manhattan and beyond.

“It’s important that we have this entity, St. Francis College, that’s growing the sport in multiple ways, by one sharing the pool and renting it to other [programs], and then in turn growing it beyond the borders of Brooklyn into Manhattan and elsewhere,” he said.

The age group’s success has often been a double-edged sword; many of Quigley’s best young players did not join the college squad, including Wolf Wigo, who went from playing in Brooklyn Heights as a teenager to winning two NCAA championships at Stanford and captaining the American team at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens.

St. Francis club players have gone on to Division I programs throughout the country, including Fordham, Iona, Navy, MIT—and Wigo to Stanford. BHSF also provides opportunities for age-group play outside of Brooklyn, including leagues in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, Annapolis at the U.S. Naval Academy, and the Olympic Development program run by USA Water Polo.

A significant limitation to growing the sport in New York City is the dearth of quality pools. The St. Francis pool—which BHSF shares with Imagine Swimming’s Mako Polo age group team—is barely adequate for intercollegiate play.

“In California] on one campus you have three or four pools that can host tremendous aquatics events. In New York City we don’t have one venue that can host anything like that,” Quigley said. “We play water polo [at St. Francis] at the very highest level in the college ranks [but] have a pool that is not even one-half of the actual playing field required by FINA for a water polo match.”

Brooklyn water polo’s guardian angel is most proud of the club’s longevity; despite a changing demographic in the city’s most populous borough, BHSF has grown to 60 players.

But he does have one regret: “I just wish I could have built a pool,” said Quigley, ruefully.

PHOTO CAPTION: St. Francis Brooklyn’s Carl Quigley surrounded by Terrier players
PHOTO CREDIT: Carl Quigley