Water Polo

Water polo is a team sport played in a swimming pool, seven players a side, six field players and one goalkeeper, who pass and drive a ball by hand across four quarters, attempting to throw it into the opposing goal in water too deep for players to touch bottom. The game grew out of Victorian swimming exhibitions in Scotland and England in the 1870s: William Wilson, the first Baths Master at the Arlington Baths Club in Glasgow (founded 1870), is credited with developing an early set of rules for a rough, rugby-like contest played with an india rubber ball, which came to be called water polo from the English pronunciation of the Balti word pulu, ball. It was among the first team sports on the modern Olympic program, contested at the Paris 1900 Games alongside football and rugby.