WE WANT TO OFFER CHILDREN THE MAXIMUM BENEFIT THAT CAN BE GAINED FROM WATER POLO
In today’s era of alarming increases in childhood obesity, depression, and social media addiction, the coaches of the XBS water polo club have set themselves a tough task: to provide their charges with the best possible start in life. This includes not just physical activity, but also a focus on nutrition, motivation, and mental well-being. Michal Kratochvíl, the head of XBS Swimming Academy and the water polo club, shared his insights.
The XBS Water Polo Club is part of the activities of the XBS Swimming Academy. Can you introduce the courses and activities you offer to the public?
We offer a wide range of sports opportunities for all age groups, from babies to adults. Children start learning to swim with us as toddlers within the XBabieS program, and then we have swimming prep courses for children around four years old. Not every child who attends the prep course has to become a swimmer. What’s important is that they learn the basics. But if they like it, they have the opportunity to continue. They can focus solely on swimming or sign up for water polo. We also have a category for adults called XBS Amateurs, which is amateur water polo. Besides that, we organize school swimming lessons and increasingly popular summer swimming camps. The main activity of the Swimming Academy is the XBS Water Polo Club.
At what age can parents sign their children up for water polo?
Our water polo preparation begins for children aged 9-10. If they stick with it, they progress to younger students, then older students, and finally to juniors/cadets. The final stage is the junior category, but by then, other interests, like friends, girlfriends, or studies, often come into play.
Is it possible for a youth sports club to sustain and develop itself financially in Slovakia?
It’s very difficult for a sports club in Slovakia to sustain itself. Membership fees from parents barely cover the costs. It’s not just about pool and dryland training at our home pool in the x-bionic® aquatic sphere. There are also trips to tournaments, training camps, and clinics. We aim to make this sport as accessible as possible for children, so we follow a rule where half of the tournament costs are covered by parents and half by the club. We try to fund the club through additional teaching and other activities within the Swimming Academy. We’re also closely linked with the non-profit organization NADÁCIA (Fund) X-BIONIC® SPHERE, which supports young athletes through grants, donations, scholarships, and public benefit projects. This foundation creates the conditions and support for our operations, just like it does for other sports clubs within the XBS Sports Academy.
What is the goal and direction of the XBS water polo club?
Our philosophy is to offer children the maximum that water polo has to offer. We aren’t focused solely on winning gold medals, though we do care about our players improving continuously. We want them to experience how this sport is played not just at home, but elsewhere as well. We travel to various tournaments across Slovakia and abroad, such as in Croatia, Hungary, and Serbia. As the first – and so far the only – Slovak water polo club, we participated in the HaBaWaBa International Festival in Italy and last year’s TOMO tournament in Dubrovnik, where 40 teams from all over Europe competed.
How do the players and their parents view this?
I would divide them into two groups. For some kids and their parents, water polo is just an extracurricular activity, a way for the kids to burn off energy so they can enjoy their dinner more. They come to practice, have fun, but when it’s time to put in effort to improve, they don’t want to, because they don’t have to try in other areas of their life either. Everything is handed to them on a silver platter. Then there are those players who understand what the sport entails and that hard work will lead to results. For these children, the opportunities offered through XBS water polo are a strong motivation.
What kinds of opportunities are those?
I’ve spent many years in the Slovak water polo national team and various foreign clubs, and now I use my connections and relationships from my professional career to benefit my charges. For example, our club has a long-standing partnership with the prestigious Serbian water polo club Radnički Kragujevac. The president of the club, a former teammate from Saudi Arabia, has brought the club from the second division to the top. The coach of this club is also the coach of the Serbian national team, which won gold at the Paris Olympics this year. Four players from this club stood on the Olympic podium. For our serious and hardworking players, we organize camps in these established European clubs and arrange internships so they can learn from the best. One example is our player Danko Lúč, who first went on a three-month internship to this Serbian club and is now spending the entire season there. This opportunity allows him to train daily with the Serbian national team coach and practice alongside Olympic champions.
Anyone with even a little understanding of sports can imagine the kind of daily motivation that being in such an environment brings…
Yes, the competition in training doesn’t allow him to slack off, and that’s where real progress happens. It’s similar to how a regular chef from a Slovak restaurant would feel cooking with Gordon Ramsay. Of course, he’d be nervous about chopping onions properly without embarrassing himself, but that’s the point – he’d give his best repeatedly, which would elevate him to another level. Danko will gain a lot from this season.
Danko Lúč serves as a motivational example for all your players. How will a season in Serbia specifically benefit his future?
Playing in a club with Olympic champions can open many doors for him. The next step could be pursuing water polo professionally full-time, or he could receive a water polo scholarship at a university in the USA and study for free or at minimal cost. And if not that, I have contacts with clubs in Paris that would cover his accommodation and meals, and he could play in the first or second league while learning French. This scenario is not just for this one player. Honestly, we are not building a first-league team here to beat Nováky or Slávia UK. We see that when kids turn 18, they begin to have completely different interests than water polo. Most of them don’t see the point in it anymore because they lack goals and motivation. Instead of training, they’d rather get a part-time job to earn money. However, if they see that this sport can provide them with a better starting point for the future, it’s a completely different narrative.
Returning to Serbia, you were there with players for a two-week camp…
We took twelve players who we believed it would make sense for. The camp was half paid by the club and half by the parents. The kids had two training sessions a day, two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening, plus dryland training. They received, so to speak, a concentrated dose of Serbian water polo. After their return, the ten days of hard training were noticeable in their performance and fitness. They also had the opportunity to meet players from other countries, which was a big boost for them. We try to make the most of our collaboration with the mentioned Serbian club, and we bring their know-how to our players here in Slovakia. Four times already, we’ve had a coach from that club, responsible for youth, come and train with our kids morning and evening for a week. He also trains and coaches us, the coaches.
Your efforts are not limited to sports training…
Many clubs don’t address this, but we also focus on other aspects of our players’ lives. We try to teach them discipline and proper behavior. Some things may seem to “take away their comfort” at first, but they are actually beneficial to them. When we play league games, the players hand in their mobile phones in the morning and get them back for ten minutes in the evening to call their parents. We try to treat them as equals and explain that they don’t really need phones to live. They bring board games and cards to spend their free time more meaningfully than on their phones. Chips, sugary drinks, and sweets are banned. We all eat together in restaurants that provide quality food; we don’t let them eat just anything. This can help them perform better in matches and train more effectively. Many parents appreciate this.
When it comes to behavior, eating habits, and overall approach, how do you work with them?
We cooperate with a well-known sports psychologist, Michala Bednáriková. We’ve already organized two free lectures for parents. We, the coaches, also regularly train with her to better understand how to communicate with children during training and with their parents, and to fine-tune various nuances of communication. We also organized a lecture for parents on the nutrition of young athletes with a well-known nutritionist and scientist from FTVŠ UK, Associate Professor Milan Sedliak. They also addressed the BMI index of the children, and the nutritionist provided practical advice on how to adjust their children’s diet, as some of them had overweight issues. Of course, some parents took it to heart, others didn’t. For us, it’s important to provide this option. It’s then up to them to decide whether to do something about it.
What do you repeatedly struggle with when it comes to your players?
With many bad habits learned at home, from obesity to the mindset that the child doesn’t need to strive for anything, everything is handed to them automatically—new Jordans every month. Then it’s hard to motivate them to swim a hundred-meter freestyle under 1:10. Even though I know they’re capable of it, they just don’t feel like it. Often, children who are too chubby come to our water polo prep, signed up by parents under the naive belief that because water provides buoyancy, their child will find it easier to play sports in the water than if they had to run in football or handball. Then they find out that’s not the case.
And do they start slacking off?
The biggest challenge is the regularity and consistency of training. For some kids, it’s hard to attend regularly; they claim there are too many training sessions and that they’re overwhelmed. When I was arranging Danko Lúč’s placement with a Serbian host family, I asked how often the kids there train. The answer was once a day on weekdays and twice a day on weekends since there’s no school and they can train more. And days off? They sometimes have Mondays off. So, the kids there train daily, typically from eight to ten in the evening. And what if they have to be in class at eight the next morning? It doesn’t matter. In fact, they have it easy—at the club in the neighboring town, kids train from ten at night until midnight because that’s when they have access to the pool. I know it’s not healthy, but I’m just illustrating that anything is possible if there’s the will. You just have to step a little out of your comfort zone. The result can be something like with the Serbians—they became the best in the world at the Olympics.
Source: x-bionic® sphere
