Soccer isn’t the only sport where the US Women’s National Team is crushing the competition.
The women’s national soccer team is still riding the wave of their powerful World Cup victory this month, and for good reason. Their championship ways have inspired a new generation of female athletes and given a boost to women’s soccer attendance numbers across the country.
Now turn your attention, if you will, to the US Women’s National Water Polo team, which beat Spain in the FINA World Championship on Friday in Gwangju, South Korea, by a score of 11-6. (FINA is the Fédération Internationale de Natation, or the International Swimming Federation.) With that victory, they sealed their third world championship win in a row — a feat no other national water polo team, men’s or women’s, has ever achieved.
Think that’s dominance? There’s more: They’ve won 53 games in a row and will be looking to grab their third straight gold medal in next year’s Summer Olympics in Tokyo. In fact, they’re the only team to win a medal in every Olympic water polo event since women’s water polo became an Olympic sport in 2000.
Oh, they’ve also won three straight World Cups.
After the women’s historic win, coach Adam Krikorian said the players hear people mention them in the same vein as the women’s national soccer team and the women’s national basketball team, both dominant in their respective sports. And they take that comparison very seriously.
“We take great pride; we want to show people what we can do as a team, as a program, as a collective staff,” he said. “And we feel like we’re spokespeople also for the sport of water polo. … There’s a bigger purpose to this than just the selfish glory. It’s inspiring for us to continue this run, and hopefully, we can moving forward.”
If you’re ready to expand your sports viewing into the world of women’s water polo, you don’t need to wait until Tokyo 2020 to do it. The USWNT (water polo edition) is headed to the 2019 Pan American Games in Lima, Peru, next month.
