The Michigan State men’s club water polo has advocated becoming a varsity sport and for more support from the university regarding pool facilities, practice times and funding over the last few years. But the university, including the Board of Trustees and the club sports department, has continuously disapproved of the club’s efforts to transform into a varsity sport, despite persistent team success and ongoing advocacy.
Junior goalie Cooper Randall, a former club president, spoke multiple times with the club sports department, including club sports director Angela Michael, and Brian Fickies, who informed Randall that funding would be the main issue when trying to become a varsity team. The pair also mentioned that the club would run into problems no matter who the club talked to, such as the MSU athletics department.
“It’s been a hard battle and a hard conversation to try to become a varsity sport at MSU. It’s been brought up in the past, and we kind of seem to hit a wall, because every time we talk to any faculty, they say it’s a funding issue,” Randall said. “It’s hard to take action on that without getting a huge donor.”
MSU is building a new recreational center, including a natatorium, that anyone — students, athletes, faculty, staff, and alumni — which means opportunity for the men’s and women’s club water polo teams. The club’s constant push for change led to this advancement, and the club believes this will help its chances of becoming a varsity sport, or at least gaining more attention from MSU.
The new swimming complex will include a 50-meter, Olympic-sized pool with 8-10 lanes, state-of-the-art locker rooms, family change rooms, gender-neutral change rooms and more storage space. This project, three years in the making, ensured the pool would be vastly different from the current one, which is a 25-yard pool with six lanes and an extended bulkhead, which totals 33.5 yards.
Progress from the university has come from years of advocacy, including sitting in Board of Trustees meetings, conversations with Fickies, assistant director of aquatics, facility and risk management, and Michael, and gaining support from alumni and current students.
WKAR Sports reached out to Kristin Mackley, the executive assistant to Alan Haller, for a comment on the club’s efforts and advocacy, and asked how much funding, and other qualifications, the club needed to become a varsity sport. Mackley didn’t return a phone call.
Randall, a forestry major, said the back-and-forth between the club and the university has been a struggle. MSU made going varsity seem nearly impossible: the club needed to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars since funding was the main issue.
The club holds fundraisers throughout the year and receives contributions from various donors. Also, throughout the season, each player pays between $275 and $450 in dues.
The payment of $450 is broken into two payments. Each person pays $250 for the first half of the season, and the second round of dues is $200 for the travel team, or A team, and $75 for the practice team, or B team; the travel and practice teams are decided by skill level after tryouts. The dues are based on how much money the club needs to cover expenses, such as pool time, hotels, tournament costs and paying the coaches. This is divided equally for everyone for the first round.
The second round of dues for the travel team includes expenses for travel, tournaments, and pool time, while the practice squad covers the rest of the pool time.
Sophomore center and president Logan Stevens is relatively new to the club’s activism, but quickly understood the complicated history.
He wants to further the team’s success after underperforming in this past season’s Big Ten conference. The team finished second in the Big Ten, unable to get a bid to the Collegiate Water Polo Association National Championships — only the Big Ten champions are invited to nationals. Since 2000, the men’s water polo team has won the Big Ten 12 times, most recently in 2023, and won the CWPA National Championships four times, most recently in 2021.
Most of the team would like to play varsity water polo, Stevens said, and he and the team will continue pushing its agenda to the university to create more change.
“I’m going to try this year, but as a club, you only have such a big vote,” Stevens said. “I’ve talked with a lot of my friends, a lot of them would like to because it’s just really cool. We all care about the game enough, but we just don’t get the practice time or ability to actually be able to do it.”
The team only gets eight hours to practice each week, which the players pay for, split up into two-hour blocks from Mondays to Thursdays, starting at 8 p.m. The pool at IM West is small, and is far from ideal when the team hosts its annual Sparty Invite tournament, Fickies said.
Other tournaments throughout the season are the Big Ten Crossovers, Big Ten regional to get seeding for the Big Ten Tournament, a tournament played in Toronto, and eventually the Big Ten Tournament and possible entrance into the CWPAs. Through these tournaments, practices and time spent outside of the pool, this team has become a brotherhood, three players said. Stevens said what helps make the team more cooperative is that because water polo is such a difficult sport to play, everyone gives in all their effort — they all want to be there and improve as a team.
“We’re trying to get even closer this year, because the closer we can get out of the pool, the better it makes us in the pool,” Stevens said.
The new rec center, built on the corner of Harrison Road and Shaw Lane, across from the Breslin Center, will be open in Spring 2026, and the pool will open later that fall, according to Fickies.
“I’m super excited that the university is going to invest in the students and into aquatics. Our pools are 75-plus years old, so what it allows our campus to do is expand its aquatic offerings and give the students, like the water polo club, an official Olympic-size competition pool for their sport,” Fickies said. “They get to have a facility that will be aligned with all our Big Ten counterparts.”
The club hopes this new, revamped facility will help persuade university administrators that the club is ready to become a varsity sport. Stevens said it will be a “perfect opportunity” to try and build a case and gain more recognition from the school, especially with new Board of Trustee members, Rebecca Bahar-Cook and Thomas Stallworth, after unsuccessful past Board meetings.
Players don’t need “insane setups” or gigantic team rooms, Stevens said, but would like access to trainers and help with tutors, and the ability to practice for more than eight hours per week.
Sophomore center Dominic Lee, a defense biosystems engineering major, said he wants the whole team to travel together and have the university pay for pool time, instead of carpooling to tournaments and arriving at locations at separate times, as well as paying fees at the beginning of the season. It’s important to think about “what’s realistic,” he said.
“To think, if we had the support of the university — and not necessarily just financial support — but recognition or support when you have to miss classes on a Friday to go to a tournament, or support with pool time and equipment, it’s really exciting to think about how good this program could become at varsity-level,” Lee said.
Stevens said club athletes will sacrifice more time and energy to play at a higher level. Randall believes the team deserves to be a varsity sport: they put in the work, they have the people behind it, and the players are passionate, both when playing and when advocating.
“It’s just a matter of designating it,” Randall said. “We compete at a high enough level to compete at that designation.”