CANOE POLO?

Standing next to an outdoor swimming pool wearing jeans and a t-shirt wasn’t exactly how I’d planned on spending my Thursday night, but when I was invited to attend a training session for canoe polo, a sport I know very little about, I was more than intrigued. Getting the chance to sit down after the session, my shoes now soaked through, with Angus Boyle, a member of Team GB’s U-21 team, gave me the perfect opportunity to get my head wrapped around the sport. While I’d hope I would be able to perfectly explain the rules now, using Angus’s own words would be far more understandable: “Canoe polo is a team sport that involves two teams of up to eight players, five players on the pitch at once and three Subs. You play on a pitch similar to a water polo pitch with the objective of scoring the ball into the goal. The goals in canoe polo, unlike water polo are two metres elevated from the water, so strung up in the air or floating, so yeah, it’s whoever scores the most, wins the game. A game starts with a sprint start so both teams start on their backlines and the ref throws the ball on the pitch and a player from either team competes in a race to win the ball in the middle. Teams set up in a defensive structure and an attacking structure and there’s a 60 second shot clock - so if a shot is not made within 60 seconds, or the balls not turned over, it’ll be an automatic change of possession to the other team.”

The sport’s played at an amateur level, so isn’t currently a feature in the Olympic games, however World Championships take place every two years, with European or regional competitions sandwiched in between within the World Games.

Angus got into canoe polo at a young age, ferried to and from training by his father, he said: “My dad is a big kayaker and has been kayaking his whole life. He started taking me and some of my mates kayaking after school and I eventually started an after school club for kayaking which then led to kayak polo once we developed, and from then it became a polo club. We’d train three times a week, on the weekends and summer camps and schemes to try and promote the club and bring more kids into it. Once we’d formed a team, we’d start going to competitions for youth that my dad would host. It’s just been developing and developing ever since.” This developed has given Angus the opportunities to travel Europe with the team, competing at the highest standard at U-21 level: “Being able to play at the top level of an amateur sport is so amazing because you just get experiences you wouldn’t have with professional sport. Especially in the countries where there’s a large crowd, like, last year in France there was a few thousand people in the crowd for the final and it was just surreal, the atmosphere was unreal.”

There’s optimism within team GB that the next two years will bring good fortune, as well as Angus’s club team hoping to improve even further, he said: “I’ve been playing now for four years at the under-21 level – I have two years left and I want to win one of the major competitions. We have Europeans this year and Worlds next year. There was a lot of set-backs last year to stop us getting to that but with the Team GB U-21 we believe that if we put everything together right we can be competing for the top places in the Europeans, and at my club level for Ulster in Belfast we hope to be coming in the top half of competitions.”

by Matt Groom