Liquid refreshment: News Corp in water polo deal
WATER polo is back, after a two-year hiatus, and a new broadcast deal between Water Polo Australia and News Corp means fans will be able to livestream more than 200 games next year.
The deal covers the Australian Waterpolo League (AWL), Australian Youth Championships (under-14s to under-18s) and the Summer Slam.
Games will stream across a range of News Corp websites.
Following two years of cancelled competitions, this season’s national competitions will feature more matches than ever before.
The season will start with the Summer Slam in Brisbane from January 10, a stateversus-state competition for under-16s, 18s and 20s.
Olympians and future stars vying for a spot in teams bound for Paris 2024 will then go head-to-head in the AWL, which starts on Australia Day.
Eleven teams will battle it out across 230 games of water polo in a new-format, eightweek competition.
All teams will battle it out for the KAP7 Cup in the first two weeks and just the top six will progress to the championship rounds.
Each team in the championship will play each other twice across five rounds before the finals series in April.
The bottom five teams will play off for the Southern Cross Cup, over four rounds.
Queensland Thunder, which won the last tournament in 2019, is shaping up as the team to beat.
Rising star and member of the Stingers training squad, Bridget Leeson-Smith, said after 24 months of training she was nervous and excited to finally play a competitive match again.
The 24-year-old utility said it was a “stab in the heart” when the 2021 competition was cancelled.
“It has been such a tough 24 months, especially for the girls who were not in the Olympic squad,” she said. “We hardly competed and have just been in no man’s land. We are so excited to have it back and have been training 11 times a week.”
Leeson-Smith welcomed the news that several AWL games would be livestreamed in 2022 and said the AWL was the opportunity for rising stars to show selectors and coaches what they could do in the pool.
Water Polo Australia CEO Richard McInnes said: “We are excited to extend our partnership with News Corp Australia that will see more than 200 games streamed live, the most water polo matches Aussies have ever had available.”