Attacker Petra Pardi is the only senior on the ASU water polo team and was fresh off being recognized for her contribution to the team before it faced UCLA, the final home game of the regular season.
Head coach Todd Clapper is proud of how Pardi has grown and matured in her time at ASU, and looks to her experience to help lead the team one last time.
“She's been great,” Clapper said. “I’ve seen her grow from freshman year till now, as a player and a person. It’s been a delight. I’m really proud of her. Thankfully, we have more games to play, and I’m looking forward to her really leading this team to that next step, and hopefully NCAA.”
Although Pardi is the only senior on the team, she’s had to work her way into the role of being a leader.
“This entire year I’ve been trying to work my hardest, and be a leader in that aspect to try and show the freshmen and everyone else on the team that hard work does pay off,” Pardi said. “That is what ASU water polo is about.”
As her time with the team draws to a close, Pardi recalled some of her favorite memories over her four years playing for ASU.
“I have lots of favorite moments, starting with beating Cal for the first time in my freshman year and beating UCLA here at home the year after,” Pardi said. “Cal games are always the game. Beating USC in double overtime at the MPSF tournament, that was amazing.”
Like many players on the water polo team, Pardi is an international player and did not grow up in the U.S. Not only did she have to become acclimated to a new country, but a new perspective on water polo and what it means to be an athlete.
“It was challenging at first,” Pardi said. “It was very hard. The perspective here is very different than in Hungary. In Hungary I was considered an athlete and that's all I had to do. You're an athlete. You train hard; that's what you are. But coming here, it opened up my horizon a little bit. There's a lot more life. I’m a student, I’m an athlete, I'm part of this community and I have to act like it. Everywhere I go, I represent this community.”
Pardi feels at home on the team because so many of her teammates went through or are currently going through the same thing she did. Because of this, the team has grown even closer.
“Having so many international kids on our team really makes it a family, because we rely so much on each other, and really, it's part of our team tradition,” Pardi said. “When I came in as a freshman, we had the same amount of international kids, and they took me on right away. They helped me with everything I needed help with, and I feel like that is what I have been trying to do for our newcomers every single year. So this is kind of a tradition to help each other out, look out for each other, because we don't have our families here, so we instantaneously become each others family.”
Water polo runs in the Pardi family, but Petra’s dad was not initially on board with her taking up the sport.
“My dad was also a water polo player,” Pardi said. “He was playing at the Olympics in Seoul in 1988, and he was big time. He was pretty good. And so I’ve been wanting to play water polo ever since I was a little kid, but he told me his only daughter is not going to be a water polo player, but I was obviously fighting it. Then one day I was swimming, and instead of going to swim practice I went to a water polo coach, and I was like, ‘Hey, I’m Petra Pardi, and I’m pretty tall. Can I jump in?’ And he was like ‘Yeah, show me what you got.’ It was hard. I was dying the first practice. But I loved it from the first moment, so I stuck around.”
Although her father had not wanted Petra to get involved in water polo, there was no stopping fate.
“So I had been going to water polo practice instead of swim practice for about two months, and our first game was coming up, and I was like, ‘Dad, I have a game.’ And he was like, ‘What game?’ And I’m like, ‘A water polo game,’ and he was like, ‘Are you serious?’ He was the happiest though. He was really proud of me.”
Although Pardi knows her time remaining with the team is short, she has high hopes for what the team will accomplish in the remainder of the season with both the MPSF and NCAA tournaments looming.
“I have only great thoughts and great expectations,” Pardi said. “I think it’s going to be really good. We have a really good shot at beating Cal, and we have to beat them. We have no other option really. And hosting this tournament is really going to be interesting. I think it favors us really. We will be playing in our home pool, our home environment. I think it’s going to be a lot more of a comfortable environment for us.”
Like every senior, Pardi is sad about leaving a place and team that has been home and family for the past four years of her life.
“I’m just getting a little emotional about leaving ASU,” Pardi said. “That’s pretty much it. I never thought it was going to grow so close to my heart, but it definitely has.”
Pardi has two potential courses of action planned for life after ASU.
“I have two plans,” Pardi said. “One is to keep playing professionally. That would probably take me to Australia or another professional club anywhere in Europe. But I actually have really fallen in love with Arizona, and I would try to stay here and get my Master's done. We’ll see. We will see if it's plan A or plan B.”
Reach the reporter at mtsteine@asu.edu or follow @MarcTSteiner on Twitter.
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