At this East San Jose high school, a co-ed water polo team had a perfect season

After the pandemic left teens across the Bay Area without high school sports for nearly a year, the girls and boys water polo teams at Mt. Pleasant High School in East San Jose faced an even longer hiatus.

When Santa Clara County gave the green light for competition return, the Mt. Pleasant program didn’t have the numbers to put together a complete roster.

Desperate to keep water polo afloat — a necessary outlet after months and months of Zoom calls within the confines of their homes — the boys and girls decided to join forces this spring onto one, 12-player co-ed team with just enough depth to compete in the Blossom Valley Athletic League’s Santa Teresa Division.

They didn’t just compete. The Cardinals went undefeated — 8-0 in league play.

“It was a really pleasant surprise,” longtime head coach Andy McKay told the Bay Area News Group. “We started out just happy to be back in the pool and seeing each other again.”

The Mt. Plesant program has gone through its ups and downs. McKay joined the staff as the school’s swim coach in 1991 and became the boys water polo coach in 1994 when the school brought the program back to life after budget cuts shut it down in the 1980s.

Three years ago, the boys and girls teams did not win a game. They both improved last season, finishing just below .500, but graduation and the inability for McKay to recruit swimmers to give water polo a try left both rosters short-handed this spring.

The only option was to combine the teams, which isn’t unusual in the BVAL. The decision was ultimately up to the players, who decided to go for it.

“I wasn’t too worried about it,” senior Chayse Waters said. “The girls have always practiced with the guys. It wasn’t anything new to them. I knew they could hold their own.”

The girls, and their parents, acknowledge there was some hesitancy on their side. While the rules remain the same — save for a slightly smaller ball for the girls’ game — some of the seven girls who signed up were nervous about how they’d match up with the boys’ physicality in the pool.

“It was a lot of challenges,” said sophomore Isabella Perez, one of two girls to start. “A challenge for us is we’re scared they’re going to be stronger than us because they look stronger, bigger and half of them are taller. That was a challenge, but it was more mental than a physical challenge.”

Perez and her brother, Tony, a senior, are both on the team. They have played water polo and “splash ball” since they were 10 years old. Brenda Serrano-Perez, their mom, said she and other parents had conversations with the coaches to ensure they were alerting referees to overtly physical contact between the boys and girls.

“It’s hilarious because at times you catch yourself saying things out loud that you weren’t expecting,” she said. “Mumbling, ‘Don’t you drown my daughter because I’m gonna get you.’”

The parents and coaches let the kids know that even if the boys might be larger, there was no reason the girls couldn’t get physical, too.

Still, there was trepidation.

“It’s intimidating going against these giant guys with six-packs,” junior Holly Hermange said. “If you have enough technique behind what you’re doing and right placement in the water, you can overcome being physically disadvantaged.”

Hermange and her sister, Heather, a senior, are new to the sport. But Holly the younger sister found herself in a starting role.

Mt. Pleasant made the gender mix work — physical disadvantages and all.

“I suspect some feel that’s part of the game, if you’re going to get in the game you have to expect the rough stuff,” Serrano-Perez said. “I think the experience Holly and my daughter had in training with males and females gave them more confidence that they could defend themselves.

“My daughter and Holly turned it into anger, but in a good way.”

“Teams underestimated us going into games,” said Hermange. “They’d be co-ed, and the boys would ignore the girls we had in the pool.”

Mt. Pleasant wasn’t the league’s only co-ed team. Gunderson, Live Oak, Independence and Yerba Buena also had boys and girls on one roster.

But Mt Pleasant was the only team with girls in the core group of starters.

Silver Creek was the only all-boys team, with 17 players on its roster.

Mt. Pleasant beat Silver Creek first in double overtime, then again on Silver Creek’s senior night to conclude the season.

“When we won that first game,” McKay said, “I was telling our kids they’re probably physically stronger than you in a lot of ways, but that’s not just the way you win games necessarily. Use your brains and your skills”

Hermange volunteered to guard Silver Creek’s primary shooter. And the Cardinals formulated a strong game plan to counter any Silver Creek adjustment after beating the Raiders in double overtime. Between games, Hermange and Perez got their shooting reps in during practice as an answer to possible double- or triple-teams on Waters, Mt, Pleasant’s primary scorer.

“We thought they had a play to guard our whole set, Chayse, and shut him down,” senior Matthew Bolli said. “But what they didn’t know is we had everyone else practicing shooting. So everyone else could shoot also, like Izzy, Holly and the main girls in the field are all capable of shooting.”

Mt. Pleasant won the rematch against Silver Creek, 9-7.

The undefeated season was complete.

“They just really surprised me,” McKay said. “That they all stepped up.”

“They surprised themselves; they never fell apart as a team,” Serrano-Perez said. “Watching a game, you can see that the other team, at some point, becomes disarrayed. They aren’t talking to each other, calling to each other. Our kids got to a point where they can criticize each other constructively during a game, and I was so proud of that.”

While the students saw the season as a triumph, they weren’t particularly surprised that they worked so well together — boys and girls.

“There’s definitely a sense of family among all of us,” Bolli said. “I played all four years. Tony played all four years. Chayse will play all four years. We’re a small team and practicing together every day gives us an upper hand with team chemistry.”