Bay Area water sports enthusiasts are getting hooked on kayak polo

Children pedal pastel-colored boats, sailors catch a light breeze and lovers row side-by-side on a suspiciously calm Sunday on the pleasant waters of Shoreline Lake.

Suddenly, a jarring crash interrupts the tranquility.

Two kayakers, once 35 meters apart, completed a full-speed sprint with a head-on collision, a dangerous game of chicken where neither party decided to swerve. The boats connected. Loudly. Nobody was injured. The rowers were prepared for this, with caged helmets and padded life vests.

In fact, they looked forward to this all week.

“I’m about to sell you on this,” one of the rowers, Matt Summers, told an excited newcomer just before putting his boat into the water. “This is a contact sport. You can push people over.”

This is kayak polo, a sport in which a college freshman and a 60-something-year-old retiree can compete on the same field with equal levels of success.

It’s a sport in which a sixth grader and a sixth-grade teacher can — and quite happily do — drive their boats into one another in the name of athletic competition.

It’s a sport that athletes from the Bay Area Kayak Polo Club have dominated on the national stage.

The best in the country train here, at Shoreline Lake in Mountain View, once a week, and few passersby have any idea what’s going on.

“If you see someone kayaking out on the water, and they’re pretty good, we’ll be like, ‘Hey you should come join us,’” Summers said. “People on shore, a lot of the time, they come join. A lot of people ask questions.”

The requirements are quite simple: know how to kayak and know how to roll the boat (get yourself back above water quickly if the boat flips).

Once you’ve got that down, it becomes a game of physical strength and endurance, teamwork and strategy, a sort of hybrid between water polo and soccer, but played in kayaks.

“It looks like basketball,” an observer said on a recent Sunday.

There are five players per team, and the ball can only be moved by passing or shooting. You cannot paddle when in possession of the ball, and you only have five seconds to make a decision. Dribbling requires throwing the ball in front of you, then paddling to retrieve it.

Like soccer, there are formations. Different teams use different formations to capitalize on their strengths.

A goalkeeper is positioned underneath the net, which is 2 meters above the water and stands 1 meter high by 1-1/2 meters wide (the sport originated in Europe and thus uses the metric system).

From there, a team might play with three defenders and one zonal player roaming along the outside. Or they could play with two defenders and two zonal players. Or a five-player man-marking system.

On offense, a team might use a pick-and-roll play to generate scoring opportunities from the outside, or position one forward player under the net to try to get the ball to them for a close-range shot, not dissimilar to basketball.

Though played on water, the playing area is referred to as a pitch. It is 35 meters long and 23 meters wide, so as soon as one team loses possession, it turns into a frenzy of full-speed kayakers sprinting towards the opposing goal.

“There are a lot of different ways to play,” said Tim Johnson, a team veteran who grew up in the United Kingdom but helped start the Bay Area club in 1997. “Different countries develop different tactics.”

There are maybe 20 people in the entire Bay Area who play regularly, and the best of the bunch travel all over the world — their kayak and oars in tow — to compete against players in other countries.

“We have a number of players who have played on the national team,” said Bay Area Kayak Polo Club captain Peter Hargreaves, a middle school teacher in San Leandro. “So our club is one of the higher clubs. We were often winning the U.S. championship or coming in second. A pretty good club.”

On the world stage, though, the United States hasn’t had much success.

Germany has won the last three world championships on the men’s side, and France leads the all-time record with four. On the women’s side, Germany has the most titles with six.

“Australia used to be very good, and they basically out-muscled the other teams,” Johnson said. “The Dutch team, they were just huge. The British, not really big guys, but they are very athletic. Those big guys don’t do as well now. They’re not fast enough.”

Dylan Kao, a freshman at Santa Clara University, grew up playing the sport in Taiwan.

“Playing in Taiwan, Asian people are smaller, so we use more strategies and tactics,” he said. “Americans, they play muscle ball. They’re using weight to defend.”

Kao was excited when he found the Bay Area team.

“I really like it because it makes me stand out,” he said. “It’s a really cool thing to talk about. You really have to be strong mentally, because it’s a hard sport. You have to be determined.”

In the United Kingdom, all the big cities have teams, Johnson said. People often do whitewater slalom in the summer, then in winter switch to polo. But he said slalom is more of an individual sport.

“I’ve seen people come in from various different sports and be good at kayak polo,” he said. “Sometimes you get people who, even if they have no kayaking or ball skills, have the mentality to be able to pick it up if they like the water and the kayak. You just need good physical fitness.”

While the club also hosts practices at Berkeley Marina, Shoreline Lake has been a fitting backdrop for the sport because of its calm waters and warm temperatures that make it particularly refreshing to play in during the summer months.

More importantly, there are so many beginners trying out kayaking for the first time that it can provide a good introduction for folks who take up an interest.

“We had a lot of children and seniors taking kayaking classes here,” said Christina Ferrari, president of the Shoreline Lake Boathouse.

They teach introductory and advanced kayak classes and rent them out to folks in singles, doubles and enclosed kayaks, the latter of which are used for kayak polo. Interested kayakers can try the kayak polo experience and play a series of rounds on the field.

“We’re on an enclosed body of water, so in summertime, it is salt water from the Bay, and the temperature can get into the 60s,” she said. “There’s plenty of kayaking going on.”

The polo team here has players of all ages, with people from all professions, from all over the world. On a recent Sunday, eight players participating in team practice represented six different countries.

The club also puts on kids programs and will bring gear for them to learn the sport. There’s also a kids tournament hosted at Shoreline Lake each spring. A kids team was formed and flown out to New York for a recent national tournament, which they won, Summers said.

“You can basically throw someone in relatively quickly,” he said.

The youngest player who plays with the adults is 11 years old and has proven to be quite good.

“The fun part about it being the sport involving so many different skills is you can be good at one of them,” Summers said. “The kids I was working with in the spring, one of them’s like a water polo player so he can really shoot the ball, so he doesn’t have to be a great paddler. We’ll put him in front of the goal and he can flick it in.”

All you need is a paddle and determination, Summers said.

Summers, a lawyer during the week, will soon compete on the men’s national team in tournaments that can take him all over the world. He’s hopeful kayak polo will become an Olympic sport one day.

“It’s not impossible,” he said.

Details: Kayak classes start at $150, and rentals start at $30 a day. The boathouse is open 10 a.m. until 6:30 p.m., and until 7:30 p.m. on weekends, at 3160 N. Shoreline Blvd. in Mountain View; shorelinelake.com.

Other places to rent a kayak in the Bay Area:

California Canoe & Kayak, 409 Water St., Oakland; calkayak.com/rentals.

Stacked Adventures, Encinal Boat Ramp, 190 Central Ave., Alameda; stackedadventures.com/rentals.

Sea Trek, 2100 Bridgeway, Sausalito; seatrek.com.

City Kayak, Pier 40, San Francisco; citykayak.com.

Napa Valley Paddle, 6 Cuttings Wharf Road, Napa; napavalleypaddle.com.

Outback Adventures, Del Valle Regional Park, 7000 Del Valle Road, Livermore; outbackadventures.com.

Redwood Water Sports, 487 Seaport Ct., Redwood City; redwoodwatersports.com.

Half Moon Bay Kayak Co., 2 Johnson Pier, Half Moon Bay; hmbkayak.com.