8 Srba u Bruklinu
Nisu samo aktuelni teniseri i Divac naša sportska svetla tačka, ima tu još mnogo sportista koji svojim zalaganjem, umećem i ukupnim ponašanjem čine naš (politički) „uprljani“ nacionalni obraz svetlijim i čistijim. New York Times od pre neki dan prenosi čitaocima priču o 8 srba koji su deo internacionalnog studentskog vaterpolo tima (popularnih „terijera“) na bruklinškom St. Frensis koledžu.
Krenuli su put Amerike, što se kaže, „trbuhom za kruhom“ jer znaju da u Srbiji, ali i šire nam dovoljno mesta za kvalitetne igrače, te sa obećanjem boljeg obrazovanja i sigurnije budućnosti. A „tako daleko“, svoj koledž klub drže u vrhu nacionalnog vaterpolo prvenstva. Za nas ovde, nema boljih ambasadora.
“Everybody knows ‘that college which has eight Serbians,’ ” said Stepan Gencic, far left, a freshman from Belgrade.
The trip to Kennedy Airport has become an August ritual for Carl Quigley. From the St. Francis campus in Brooklyn, where he has coached water polo for 32 years, the airport is only a 30-minute drive. But for the recruits he usually goes to meet, J.F.K. is 4,000 miles from home, and the sticky floor of Terminal 3 is the first American soil they have ever tread.
Last month, Quigley picked up four members of his Class of 2011, a group of players from Hungary and Serbia whom he had never met. Quigley and his co-head coach, Michael Klochkov, do not have the resources to engage in long-distance scouting trips, so they have spent more than a decade turning nearly blind recruiting into an art.
“It’s always a gamble,” said Klochkov, who left Kazakhstan to play for Queens College in 1998. “But usually behind the name, you have a really determined person who wants to come here and achieve something. They come here to get an education, and athletic ability opens the door.”
St. Francis’s 15-man squad consists of three Americans, one Israeli, three Hungarians and eight Serbs, all with an eye on keeping St. Francis among the national elite. The Terriers are consistently ranked in the top 20 in Division I and made the Final Four in 2005, yet the college hardly fits the traditional mold of a water polo powerhouse.
First, it is not in California — 9 of the top 10 teams in the nation are on the West Coast. Second, it is not a military academy — Navy and Air Force are each ranked. And third, it is not in the Ivy League — Princeton has had a team for more than a century. St. Francis is a small liberal arts college in Brooklyn Heights with fewer than 2,200 students, a handful of athletic scholarships and a swimming pool that is rented to community groups most of the week.
Still, St. Francis has built a reputation as a premier destination for players from Eastern Europe who are also looking to pursue their education, rather than continue to the professional leagues in their home countries.
“Everybody knows ‘that college which has eight Serbians,’ ” said Stepan Gencic, a freshman from Belgrade. “Most of them don’t know the name of the college; they just know that there is a good water polo team.”
The people responsible for improving St. Francis’s reputation are the players. “In Serbia, you have maybe 100 high-level players and most of us know each other,” Nemanja Pucarevic, a senior from Belgrade, said. “So when we go back home, everyone asks, ‘How is it there?’ ”
At first, Pucarevic felt homesick. “But after a while you find the maturity to make the most of this opportunity,” he said.
An opportunity, he added, that he never expected to have growing up in a country where violence and bombings were a daily reality.
“We had to grow up faster,” he said. “It’s one bad part of our history that we all want to forget. But sport makes us proud. Someone like Novak Djokovic, who played at the U.S. Open, he makes the country proud.”
Djokovic reached the Open final, which he lost to Roger Federer.
Pucarevic said that in Serbia, water polo is nearly as popular as soccer or basketball, “because it’s a game for tough guys who are not spoiled by so much money.”
Despite never seeing them play in the flesh until their first practice in the St. Francis pool, Quigley and Klochkov make few mistakes with recruits. The Internet has allowed them to track prospects in as much detail as necessary, whether the player is from Egypt, Bulgaria or Lebanon — all countries that have been represented in recent squads.
“We know the schools that they’re from, we do our homework,” Quigley said. “We look at videotapes, we look at CDs. We have contacts over there.”
And one to two years later, those who have made the grade end up meeting Quigley at the airport. “All of a sudden you’re at J.F.K. picking up two, three of them and they’ve not seen St. Francis,” he said. “The trust on both ends and the willingness to take this risk is overwhelming to me when I realize that their parents and girlfriends let them go for it.”
But Gencic said that knowing his teammates ahead of time, having played against them growing up, made the transition smoother.
“It’s much easier to be here in the U.S.A., far from our country, when we already have friends here,” he said. “It was the most important thing for me.”
Quigley said his players are even more impressive in the classroom. From 1998 to 2001, the team was an academic national champion, meaning its players had the highest average grade point average of any water polo team in Division I. “When you consider Brown, Harvard and M.I.T., that’s pretty good company,” Quigley said.
Most of the players have to learn English as a second language, making their achievement all the more impressive. Language, however, has never been a barrier for the team. Quigley has one rule about it: In the pool, everyone speaks English.
But when they dive into the cold water at the beginning of practice, some cannot help reverting to their native tongues. The expressions may be foreign, but the sentiments are universal.
