Planning a water polo session: the water, the slot and the board
In water polo the pool decides the session before the coach does. Ignore that and you have planned a session that does not fit the slot.
The slot is the first constraint
A hall is booked; water is shared. Most clubs work in a pool that in the same hour belongs to somebody else as well — swimmers, a swimming school, a younger age group in the next lanes. That changes planning in ways a session written for an indoor court never shows.
- Time in the water is not the length of the slot. Ten minutes can pass between the official start and the squad actually working. A sixty-minute plan in a sixty-minute slot does not exist.
- The space is narrow and shared. A drill that needs the full field cannot be dropped in when the chance appears; it is planned for a slot where the field is actually yours.
- Explaining costs. Every stop to explain something cools the squad and spends the slot. Which is why water polo drills are explained before anybody gets in, not in the water.
That last point is why it pays to have water polo drills drawn and shown in advance. A minute at the poolside is worth five in the water.
Dryland and water are one plan, not two
Dryland work is often kept separately, as something that happens "if there is time". That loses the one part of training where you can work on what the water does not allow, and the one part that does not depend on the pool schedule.
Run in one plan, the week's total load is visible. Run separately, the hardest dryland session regularly lands the day before the hardest session in the water, and nobody plans that on purpose.
A water polo board is not a handball board
The field has its own markings — the five-metre line, the two-metre line, the centre. A drill drawn on the wrong field reads wrong, because the distances are not the same and the positions do not mean the same thing.
The same goes for how players are marked. In water polo the number one cap belongs to the goalkeeper and is red; a blue cap with a one on it is the kind of detail every water polo player spots in a second, and it says immediately that whoever made the material is not from the sport.
Power play and man down are the situations most worth having drawn and animated. The movements are short, precisely defined and repeated every match — and that is exactly where the difference lies between everyone knowing where to be and everyone thinking they know.
What to track across a season
Alongside attendance and the usual measurements, water polo rewards tracking how much each player was actually in the water, separately from how often they were at training. A player who spent three weeks on dryland because of a shoulder was present every session but did not do the same work — and if that is not written down, in March it looks like a drop in form for no reason.