A Huge Opportunity for NYC Water Polo as Giants in Sport Unite with College Powers
This Thursday, Asphalt Green will host New York City’s most highly anticipated water polo match in decades: the Italian giant Pro Recco vs. reigning Euro League champions Ferencvaros. Not since the beginning of the previous century, when the old Madison Square Garden—the original one on Madison Square—hosted the then new sporting phenomenon has New York seen such an ambitious arrangement for the oldest Olympic team sport.
In a warmup tonight, Pro Recco, the world’s most successful club, tips off against UCLA, the country’s top college team, followed by a match pitting Ferencvaros against East Coast collegiate power Princeton. The series of matches and their location at Princeton and Asphalt Green, New York City’s premier aquatic facility, underscore a potential turning point in the city’s mostly indifferent relationship with polo. There has not been a match of this level since Pro Recco’s last visit, also to Asphalt Green, in 2002.
European Water Polo Royalty Set for Big Apple Appearance
A difficult sport to play, requiring tremendous stamina and exceptional athletic ability, the fact that Recco owners Philip Hammarskjold and Alex Behring chose New York for a series of high profile polo contests marks their Pro Recco 2025 World Tour as an audacious gambit.
Their gambit appears to be paying off. Excitement in the city is evident with all matches sold out, including standing room. That the tour coincides with an announced expansion of host Asphalt Green’s youth water polo program is tremendous for a sport most New Yorkers know nothing about.
European Polo on the East River
When Hammarskjold and Behring rescued Pro Recco from financial ruin last August, they probably didn’t expect to end up in New York City 12 months later. In April of 2024, a 25-year love affair between former Recco owner Gabriele Volpi and his prized Genoa club came to an end. The American-based, Ivy-educated investors swooped in and captured the world’s biggest polo prize.
They financially righted the club and almost immediately plotted with Recco President Mauricio Felugo for a grand gesture: bring their club to America.
“The genesis of this trip began in the late fall of 2024 when Alex, Mauricio and I were talking about our longer-term plans for the Club,” Hammarskjold said in an email. “Ironically, my first exposure to Pro Recco came five years earlier during Recco’s last trip to the US, where they did a tour of Northern California and trained and had a friendly collegiate match at my son’s high school Sacred Heart Prep in Atherton CA.”
As American polo fans know, the sport is most dominant in California, where it’s played year-round. What distinguishes Behring and Hammarskjold’s plan was to center the trip in the East, where polo is practically invisible. They would use Princeton, New Jersey as a staging area and New York City as the grand stage for a friendly between Recco, which has won 11 Champions League titles including three in a row from 2021-23, and Ferencvaros, league winners the past two seasons.
What makes Recco’s latest visit noteworthy is the decision to invite their Hungarian rivals. Including Ferencvaros not only increased the stakes, it paralleled matches taking place this weekend on the West Coast. Marseille, France’s best pro club, and Barceloneta, the top Spanish club, travelled to the Berkeley campus of the University of California where they will play the host Golden Bears as well as the Olympic Club.
Enter Asphalt Green, the City’s Best Water
A large factor why water polo—or any aquatic sport, for that matter—has not thrived in New York is the city contains so few pools of any sort, especially ones suitable for a prestigious match. Among NYC’s five boroughs only three pools of Olympic dimension exist, and only one, Asphalt Green’s aquatic palace on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, is suitable for the world’s best professionals.
As Pro Recco ownership was sketching out grand plans to take Manhattan, David Rodriguez, Asphalt Green’s Senior Director of Aquatics, realized that the next step for his aquatics program was to grow polo.
“I thought: Here are two of the biggest collegiate names (UCLA and Princeton) in the sport combined with two of the biggest polo giants in the world,” Rodriguez said in a recent interview. “Let’s get ’em all here in the biggest city in the world and try to put together an event that showcases Asphalt Green and the sport at the highest level. It also teaches our future generation of water polo players and swimmers, the pathways are [to the] Olympics but also college.
“Showcasing both of those things in the same light was an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up.”
Asphalt Green’s David Rodriguez: The Time is NOW for Asphalt Green Water Polo
In NYC’s miniscule water polo scene, Asphalt Green is a laggard: three youth clubs compete nationally and three high schools, all in the Bronx, play competitively while three local colleges also have intercollegiate teams. Asphalt Green’s excellent facility, coupled with a 350-strong youth swim program that USA Swimming rates among the country’s top 25 could grow into a bastion for the sport. But only if pool time is available in the city’s busiest aquatic facility.
A Qualified Coach Comes Forth
As evidenced by his longevity and his program’s results—at 12 years and counting he’s the longest head swim coach in Asphalt Green’s history—Rodriguez is excellent at what he does. A fan of water polo, he played in high school and learned that to be successful at a sport as specialized as polo, you need exceptional coaching. That he settled on Ilija Duretic to grow his program is inspiring. Not only does the Serbian native have a wealth of experience as an assistant on Fordham men’s team and at Greenwich Aquatics, where he’s a full-time youth coach, Duretic is attuned to polo’s unique challenge on this coast. He has spent enough time in the New York region to know how to handle the personalities of parents and athletes who play polo here.
Changing of The Water Polo Guard at Asphalt Green
Duretic’s first practice with his new club will be Sunday; by then Pro Recco and Ferencvaros will have completed what has been a two week tour of the New York region, one that includes another meeting at Princeton. By then what will matter most is that New York polo fans maintain their enthusiasm. The danger—as happened with Pro Recco’s last visit—is for the excitement to dissipate, wasting a much needed infusion of energy.
The best outcome is that the constituencies that support polo in this city—the youth clubs, the colleges, the fans who come out for an unusual and exciting sporting event—maintain the momentum Pro Recco’s tour has inspired, so that when the club returns next year, substantial progress on AG’s youth club—and energy in the city—continues.
Michael Randazzo (the Man with a Hat) is a swimming & water polo enthusiast in New York City. He’s the executive director of Inclusive Community Wellness, a Brooklyn-based NPO that provides health and wellness opportunities to New Yorkers. When he’s not on a pool deck helping children and adults learn to swim, Randazzo occasionally writes about water polo, a sport he never played and barely understands.
