Water polo. It’s one of those sports that has to be explained to the masses every four years when the Olympics come around. What those two words mean to you, precisely, probably depends on where you’re reading this right now. If you’re on the West Coast or from there, it translates as a staple sport—one you’re familiar with, you’ve grown up around, maybe even a way of life. If you’re anywhere else in the United States, there’s a chance you might not know the game at all, or at least it isn’t the most prevalent of sports around you.
Water polo is indeed a geography, defined by locality, made up of moments in space in the pool and outside of it. Water polo, not restricted to one place, is also fast-growing and diverse enough that it can be played anywhere. It is meant to be spread.
Fittingly for Tom Hyham, the Head Water Polo Coach at La Salle University, two seminal moments in his family’s journey occurred in a car. To be clear, “journey” and “water polo journey” are the same thing for the Hyhams, as Tom explains, “It’s dinner table. It’s car rides.” It’s ingrained in conversations, vacations and delineations. But, before we get into that, we’ll begin with the car rides.
The year is 2010. Tom and his wife, Karla, had just moved their family of three daughters—Tori, Kali and Marina—back to California after raising them in Arizona. The parents had taken some time off from water polo while living in the Grand Canyon State, involving the girls in soccer and swimming as alternatives. Prior to all that, Tom had coached water polo at the high school where he and Karla met. The two first crossed paths on that pool deck as sophomores. They played on the same team together. There was never a doubt that the Hyhams would pass their favorite sport onto their children, the question was to what degree of involvement. That answer arrived while Tom and his eldest daughter, Tori, were driving around a naval base when the pair accidentally stumbled upon a sign promoting a U.S. Women’s National Team game.
The two were intrigued and went to watch the match. “I remember a lightbulb going on in my head and Tori's head. These girls look like Tori, they swim like Tori, they do all this stuff like Tori does.”
Shortly thereafter, Tori began playing water polo at the club level and in high school as a center. She was good, her team was good, and a path began to take shape for the Hyhams with water polo a central component. This only became more concrete when Kali joined her freshman year when her sister was a senior.
“I was so excited to play high school because I’d seen [Tori] play. So, yes, I looked up to her for a little bit,” with a playful smile, Kali turns to Tori sitting across the room and continues, “And then she started looking up to me.” Although she follows that with an “I’m just kidding,” both she and Marina (a year younger than Kali) quickly took to water polo and burst onto the California scene. Kali would go on to record top 10 finishes in the Junior Olympics, while Marina would play on teams that finished fourth and fifth.
Four years after Tom and Tori watched that national team game, Tom was in the car again. “I can specifically remember Karla and I were driving somewhere very close to our old high school. We were talking about somebody from one of our clubs who had taken a position as a college coach, and Karla had said to me, ‘Why don't you become a college coach?’ And I remember replying back, ‘You don't just become a college coach. You can't just say, oh I'm gonna become a college coach today.’”
True to his word, that reality didn’t materialize immediately—but the idea was there. It wasn’t something that the pair considered seriously until years later, at which point Tom had become a successful coach for the 18U program at Huntington Beach.
In May of 2018, it was Karla who told Tom of the job opening at La Salle. “I was the one that found the application and sent it to him,” she says. “It was one of those things that, as a wife, I had always seen his calling being working with kids and coaching, and since Marina graduated high school and didn't want to stay in California, it felt like serendipity. It felt like it fell in our lap; something that we should give a shot and try.”
Tom refrained from bringing up his job pursuit to his daughters, but as his candidacy advanced and became more serious, he posed the possibility to them. Having left home to play collegiate water polo on the East Coast, Kali (a junior utility player at Bucknell) and Marina (a sophomore goalie at Marist) were both thrilled.
Kali recalls, laughing, “When he told me about this I was very on board because I didn't think it was real. I thought it was kind of hilarious.” Spoiler alert: Tom got the job. Kali continues, “Now that it’s happened, it's definitely fun…funny…it's definitely nice to have them closer to school. It's also so funny when I see him coach. It's definitely an experience because no one else on my team has a dad that's coaching against them.”
When Tom did take the helm, no one else had such an interesting dynamic of support, either. Due to his strong ties to the California water polo system, the talent Tom had overseen at a club level inevitably became collegiate athletes, plenty of whom migrated East as well. It turned into a self-cultivated fan base of former players on opposing teams.
“I can tell you, my first year with the women, there were a lot of players on the East Coast that I know or that had been at my club. It was interesting all [that] year because teams were our biggest fans. We had teams that were cheering us on in games that had no horse in a race…and Bucknell led the charge.”
“My team loves them,” Kali agrees.
“It made it fun for me and my team. Even Marist was cheering us on. They weren't rivals yet, but they were in the same conference.”
While the reasoning behind that support might be clear, the fandom within the family isn’t nearly as obvious. After all, it’s sister vs. sister and father vs. daughter.
As parents, Tom and Karla quickly realized the difficult reality of watching children play against each other.
“We were really excited about it and as soon as the ball dropped, you knew this was nothing to be excited about,” Tom says.
Karla agrees, “It's hard because one's a goalie and the other is a field player, because if the field player scores, she's more than likely scoring against her sister. As much as I thought going into the first game, I could cheer for one in one half and the other in the other half, it was not like that and it took a piece of my soul watching that.”
From a sister’s point of view, Tori describes the experience of watching the siblings face off as “miserable…the hardest game to watch.”
It’s a much lower-key response from the two sisters themselves. Kali notes that “Marina and I are both pretty good sports about it. I joke about it now, but there's really no rubbing it in.” At that last part, the room erupts in laughter.
Marina has to clarify, “Kali does like to talk a lot.”
“I do talk a big game, but I back it up. In game, pregame, postgame.”
The sibling rivalry will spill over into the group chat with a few notable examples. After Kali had a particularly prolific game against Marist earlier this season, with Marina in net, Tom recalls a text being sent afterwards in the family group chat: Hey does anyone know how many goals I scored? To that, Kali mouths the word “five” and holds up her hand.
The chat will be especially busy when daughter goes up against dad. Tom is used to feeling the buzz of his phone blowing up in his pocket during the game with over 100 text messages waiting for him afterwards. When La Salle was tied with Marist late in the third quarter in 2018, suspiciously his phone stopped buzzing. Tom had been dropped from the group chat.
“They didn’t want to show any bias,” Tom says.
“Oh, we were. We wanted Marina to win,” Kali responds.
The rivalry intensifies and perhaps takes on a different light when Tom goes up against his daughters.
Karla isn’t shy about the side she takes, “I have a tendency to change my shirt depending on who is playing. I tell everyone my children come first. I always cheer for my children's teams, and I'm sure the girls at La Salle don't like it very much and I apologize for that.”
Tori counters with a smile, “See I'm kind of the opposite. I think [Kali] needs to be taken down a notch, so I love that Dad shuts her down, so I cheer for La Salle.”
Tom’s persistence to stop his daughter from scoring adds fuel to the fire. Both hate to lose. As John McBride, head coach of Bucknell, puts it, “Kali and I are both there to win…period.”
Illustrating this, Tom had told McBride ahead of a preseason scrimmage that he would try something different and not collapse on Kali. “I told him we weren't going to zone off of her. We're going to make her work the goal and then we zoned off her. And he came to me after the game and he said, ‘Hey I thought you weren’t going to take out Kali.’ Again, the competitiveness came in…there's nothing I want less than for Kali to score on us. She plays the position that you can shut down. You can sacrifice other areas of the game to shut her down, and I've definitely been known to do that.”
“I hate playing against him 'cause he's just mean,” Kali expressed. "He doesn't want me to get the ball."
While Tom and Kali are both outwardly competitive, Marina is more reserved. Tom tabs her as the “most competitive of us all,” but it’s contained. That gives Marist games a different feel, in addition to the fact that Tom has less control over a goalkeeper’s performance than a center’s—but emotions still come to the fore front at times. From the observation of the Red Foxes’ head coach, Chris Vidale, “They butter you up with kindness before game, and then flip a switch at go-time! You can see his mixture of pride and frustration when his daughters do something cool against his team.”
The rivalries, text messages and jokes cannot underscore the success of all three. Kali and Marina are key figures on nationally ranked teams. Tom won MAAC Coach of the Year in 2019 and leads a vastly improving La Salle side. But above all the intricacies, eccentricities and accolades is the undeniable fact that the Hyhams and water polo are inextricably paired.
As Vidale notes, “I had never met a full family of water polo junkies before I met Coach Tom and his daughters.”
Karla, who truly has championed this path, goes further in saying that the sport has given them life. “I don't know what we would be without it. It has gotten us through some hard times…It's who we are. It's something we can share; it's kept us close.”
And again, there’s the mention of proximity, of space. From Arizona to California to Pennsylvania, “There's always water polo to talk about in some way, shape, or form,” Tori says. “It stops us from getting too much distance because it brings us back together always.”
“It’s dinner table. It’s car rides.” It’s water polo.