Sports can start from any kind of ingenuity. Sometimes it's a peach basket nailed 10 feet above the floor. Sometimes it's as simple as hitting a rock with a stick.

For Owen Sweitzer, ingenuity meant a trip to Home Depot and $80 worth of PVC pipe.

Sweitzer didn't invent water polo in Cobb County, but he may as well have. Sweitzer merely discovered it thanks to the help of a mother at his suburban pool.

"We looked up water polo online after a mom had showed us how to play," said Sweitzer, "and it had the rules and the dimensions of the goals online. So we just got in a car and drove to Home Depot and bought PVC pipe. We found some net from a batting cage.

"The PVC was surprisingly expensive. I had no idea."

Budgeting wasn't the only thing Sweitzer was clueless about. In just three summers what was once a healthy alternative to swim practice has boomed into a statewide interest in a developing sport in Georgia.

Sweitzer, who graduated from Wheeler High School last spring and will attend Auburn in the fall, was one of the founding members of Georgia's first public school water polo club. Something that started as a hobby will be a sport nearly ready for Georgia High School Association interest in the fall.

"We're getting there," said Richard Tavernaro, the Wildcat Water Polo Club coach and Wheeler swimming and diving coach. "We'll have 12 teams lined up this fall. You really have to have 16 before approaching GHSA. It's come a long way fast."

Tavernaro toyed with the idea of starting a water polo club at North Cobb. When he joined the Wheeler staff as head coach last summer, he found a program ready-made for competition.

Community members had already trained several of the swimming/diving team members how to play the sport. Scrimmages were held with Pace Academy.

All the club really needed was someone like Tavernaro.

"I had some interest in doing this for some time," Tavernaro said. "I got here [to Wheeler] and the kids had already done all the work."

Tavernaro spends some of his time as president of the state's swimming and diving coaches association. That influence has proved useful.

Last fall, the club team began scrimmaging St. Pius and Pace. Then Wesleyan added a team and real competition began. The group of four held a state tournament, albeit a small one. Wheeler finished second after an overtime final loss to St. Pius.

It was just the start Tavernaro needed to lure other interested parties.

"This is just the guy we needed to be involved in the thing," said Mark Lefkow, a Marietta lawyer who has helped train local teams like Wheeler how to play. "Every once in a while, somebody contacts me and says, 'How do I get this started up in my school?' And I tell them. But to have someone who is going out and actively soliciting contacts is extremely helpful."

Although interest is growing, there are significant hurdles to the development of water polo into a GHSA sport. Wheeler's club program takes no money from the school's athletics department and has even recruited team members from three other Cobb County schools: Hillgrove, Walton and Campbell.

That county unity is a sign of a larger issue.

"The sport we would hope to mimic is lacrosse," Lefkow said. "The only challenge we have that is particular to water polo that's different than lacrosse is pool space. In lacrosse, what you need is a field. Every school has one of those. Not every school has a pool."

Wheeler's team members have spent the last two summers bouncing between aquatic centers and local pools. The Wildcats are also co-ed and if the sport were to have set schedules, it would be played in the fall prior to the winter swimming and diving seasons.

But juggling boys and girls teams and back-to-back seasons may not be a very large hurdle, Tavernaro said.

"We've had a problem with some concerns with athletics directors who think it may take away from fall sports," he said. "If we became a varsity sport, I could field enough girls to start a team and have two separate teams. And as for swimming, if they start swimming in the fall, they come in out of shape.

"In water polo, that's what you do. You swim a lot. So from that point, it helps."

Reaching varsity status is still years away, it seems. But Sweitzer doesn't believe it will take long for the rest of Georgia to take interest in this new sport.

"A swim practice is kind of hard," Sweitzer said. "But after my first practice and first game of water polo, I was completely wiped. I was just so tired. But all it took was scoring my first goal. After that, I was hooked."

READY TO DIVE IN

Teams ready to go

Collins Hill

Dalton

Etowah

Grady

McEachern

Pace Academy

Riverside Military

Rockdale County

St. Pius

Wesleyan

West Forsyth

Wheeler

Could be ready

Adairsville

Darlington

Kennesaw Mountain

Marist

Rome

Westminster