The new varsity women’s water polo season is starting to take shape, and the defending NCAA champions, University of Southern California (8-0), are off to a fast start, outscoring opponents 140 to 19. Leading the way for the top-ranked Trojans has been native Hollander Maude Megens (18 goals), who appears fully recovered from the injury that impaired her 2018 season and is surrounded by many highly skilled players. Perhaps the most intriguing player on head coach Jovan Vavic’s roster, though, will also be one of the youngest players in the pool: Paige Hauschild.
A stand-out at all levels of competition—and not yet 20
Hauschild, at the tender age of 19, has enjoyed an immense amount of early success, including, in addition to an NCAA title at USC, designation as 2018 Mountain Pacific Sports Federation (MPSF) Newcomer of the Year and multiple appearances for Team USA starting in 2017 when she was still in high school.
Team USA’s roster contains many super-talented players young and old, and has won 10 straight international tournaments dating back to 2015. But for U.S. head women’s coach Adam Krikorian, the youthful Hauschild has been a revelation. During a Pac 12 broadcast last year of a USC match, Krikorian was enthusiastic: “A fabulous player [who has] the versatility to score in so many different ways… so much talent, so much ability.”
Last summer, while she was leading the U.S. Senior Women’s team with three goals in an 18-8 victory against host Holland, her club team, Santa Barbara 805 Water Polo Club, was preparing for the Junior Olympics. Cathy Neushul, Hauschild’s head coach at 805, lamented that Paige wasn’t able to fly back from Europe to play for her 18U team—even though she was age-eligible to compete in USA Water Polo’s 18U bracket. “If we had had her we would have won, for sure. There’s no doubt.”
Santa Barbara 805 Water Polo Club last spring after placing third at the U.S. Open. Cathy Neushul is on the right; Paige Hauschild is holding the plaque on the left. Photo Courtesy: Peter Neushul
“Of course, everybody panicked when they saw her name on there,” Neushul, whose daughters Jamie and Kiley play with Hauschild on the world’s top women’s polo team, said. “She had just played with us at U.S. Open—that’s an unlimited age group, so you can have 12-year-olds or 50-year-olds on [the roster]. And she just ripped it up; she almost was too much for that.”
This development comes as no surprise to her former club coach.
“She’s one of the phenoms that has come out of the Santa Barbara Water Polo club,” Neushul said, a list that includes her daughters as well as Kami Craig, a double-gold Olympian. The 805 coach declared that her star polo player could just as easily have been a world class swimmer.
Saying that Hauschild swam a low 23 or a high 22 fifty “without really any training,” Neushul added: “[S]he’s just a physical specimen who, if she concentrated on swimming, probably could have been a world-class swimmer, too.”
Opponents agree: “She’s really, really special.”
You can’t just take the word of her coach, albeit one who worked with Hauschild for many years. Adam Wright, head coach for the Trojans’ biggest rivals, the Bruins of UCLA, agrees just how significant an impact player Hauschild is in the college game today.
“Paige is special,” Wright said in a recent interview. “She’s got a bright future; the sky’s the limit for her.”
Which is an interesting observation, considering the fact that the greatest offensive threat on Wright’s women’s squad, Maddie Musselman, is perhaps Hauschild’s primary rival for the U.S. women’s squad. As Musselman—the main sniper in Team USA Head Coach Krikorian’s attack at the 2016 Rio Olympics—dealt last year with injuries that limited her play for UCLA and for the U.S., it was Hauschild who filled the scoring gap for the Americans.
Maddie Musselman, UCLA’s star striker. Photo Courtesy: Catharyn Hayne
Neushul, who’s extremely familiar with Krikorian’s roster because of her daughters’ involvement with Team USA, said of Hauschild and Musselman, “They’re super-similar in the way they play. They both play the same position, they’re both fast and long and tall. They probably interchange for each other.”
Pointing out how much her time at USC and with the national team has improved her, Neushul added, “Since Paige has been at college, she’s probably put on 40 pounds of muscle mass with weight training and practicing twice a day at a really intense level.”
After early success, what next?
Hauschild is poised to be a major contributor for what is expected to be another gold-winning effort by the Americans at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo—as she demonstrated after an electrifying performance last summer in Siberia, where she poured in a remarkable seven goals against hapless South Africa.
But for now, the pressures of college and NCAA competition command her attention. With 12 goals so far in this young season, Hauschild is contributing to her college squad, but not as yet to the extent that she did in 2018. Given the assembled talent on the USC roster—including Megens, Denise Mammolito, and newcomers Alejandra Aznar, Mireia Guiral and Tilly Kearns—it may be that she’s seeking her special niche—the sweet spot where she and her teammates mix in the most effective way for the welfare of the squad.
The situation seems to mirror the conditions with the U.S. senior national team, where a talented, experienced group of players gave their youngest member the space to develop.
“[The U.S.] is in a really fortunate situation where they can develop a player like Paige, she can make mistakes and they can still win,” Neushul said. “That’s the beauty of having a team like that; you can develop players like Paige. We’re just seeing a very small part of what her potential is going to be for the future.”
Referring to last year’s UANA Junior Pan American Championship, where Hauschild would likely have been the best player, male or female, in the water, her coach said: “Paige at the UANA Games would have been the Paige show; and then the younger players aren’t developing. So they don’t need Paige; she’s developing at her level with a group of really skilled players. She grown leaps and bounds just from playing with the national team.”
Stanford’s Ryann Neushul; an emerging star for the Cardinal. Photo Courtesy: Catharyn Hayne
Ironically, Neushul’s prized student will now be matched against her daughter. Ryann Neushul, Hauschild’s teammate last summer on the national team, is a freshman this season at Stanford. Both women are listed on the U.S. junior women’s team roster, though Hauschild is also on the senior team squad.
They’ll be on opposite sides when the Cardinal and the Trojans face off this season, certainly on March 30 when Stanford travels to Los Angeles to face USC. But it’s also highly likely that the two teams will meet in the annual Barbara Kalbus Invitational, which takes place later this month at UC Irvine.
But no matter the pool, no matter the level of play, it’s clear that Hauschild has the ability and the desire to make good—this season and beyond.
With Chip Brenner