She is not a rookie when it comes to competing at the Summer Olympics, but Kindred Paul says she is thinking about her water polo teammates who will swim at the Olympics for the first time this month when Team Canada heads to France.
“We want to go there, soak it in, let the new girls enjoy that experience, but also ground them in, ‘We do this every day. We’ve been practising the same stuff (and) your body knows what to do,'” the Edmonton-area athlete said during an an appearance on Global News at Noon Edmonton on Friday.
“The team right now is about half veterans and half kind of younger rookies. So those of us who were able to go to Tokyo 2020, we kind of have that experience of, ‘It’s big, it’s exciting, but at the end of the day, it’s still just water polo.'”
The 28-year-old athlete has impressive experience on the international stage, beginning with when she won silver at the 2014 Youth World Championships. Among her achievements is being part of the team that won a silver medal at the 2019 Pan Am Games in Lima.
Paul said her team is currently in Montreal and doing mostly tactical practices, like working on its power play and penalty kill. Before heading to France, Paul and her teammates will head to Italy to play that country’s team. She believes her team is capable of performing well at the Olympics later this month, but said they will “have to come out aggressive.”
“We have a really solid defence,” she noted. “We can lock it down there, but we need to come out aggressive, shooting hard, not afraid to take shots on offence and kind of just be testing people right away, showing them we’re not just there to be there but to compete.”
Paul explained what it is about water polo that makes her passionate about the sport and said the way she was introduced to it was “kind of a classic water polo story.”
“I think most of us, myself included, started off doing competitive swimming and then got a little bored of just the back and forth,” she said. “Spruce Grove was starting up the Polo Bears club and my parents kind of threw us into it.
“It was kind of love at first swim, I guess you could say.”
Paul was animated when explaining what makes her love the sport so much.
“I love that every game, every practice is a bit different,” she said. “It’s fast-paced, it’s exciting, it’s physical — but there’s also so many technical aspects to it.
“It’s kind of the perfect sport to combine technique, tactics, physicality and fitness.”
Since she first started playing water polo at the age of eight, the sport is “definitely growing” in Canada, Paul said.
“When I was growing up, there weren’t very many competitive women’s teams in Edmonton and now we have competitive teams going to national championships and we have young girls going to junior team trips every year, which is really great to see,” she said.
“I do think Canada though, we fell a little bit behind with COVID(-19). We were a bit stricter with our restrictions while a few other countries loosened up a bit earlier. So we’re kind of making up that ground now but it’s great to see so many people playing.”
At her last Olympics, Paul’s team finished in seventh place. She is optimistic about the team’s chances of improving on that finish this summer in France.
“I think we have the team that can do it.”
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