When it comes to water polo, Taeghan Hack is going to be molto bene after a trip to Italy.
Hack, a 15-year-old former member of the Estevan Sharks Water Polo Club, and some of the members of the U19 make and female team Saskatchewan Water Polo players got to train and work for a week in Italy at one of the best places to learn the sport, Boglisaso.
“They bring up trips every year and at this time I finally got a chance to go,” said Hack, a member of the U19 and U16 National Championship League teams with Team Saskatchewan. “There were 15 of the girls and 12 of the boys in U19.”
The players learned a lot about the cross training with the Italian teams while they were there in the small town of 4,500 people, which has a 1A ranking in European water polo.
“We could fix what we were doing and that will also help us pull out their tricks and use it when we’re back here in Canada and play against other teams,” she said. “It was more team tactics. There’s a thing called the end zone and we worked on that and we’ll use it here in Canada to do our end zone during our games.”
It wasn’t just water polo. On the weekend of the training, they went to the larger city of Genoa, Italy to do a bit of shopping and then Cinque Terra, five picturesque old villages on the Italian Riviera.
“You take the train to each village, and each train ride would take about three minutes, and tour around and they were so beautiful,” she said.
Hack enjoyed the gelato in Boglisaso and the street markets of the small town.
Doing more training since moving to Regina, Hack has been training with the team for a few years, and head coach Cyril Dorgigne of Saskatchewan Water Polo has tried to maintain and foster connections to clubs worldwide.
Hack has been on the silver medal winning team at 2016 Westerns in Surrey, B.C. and 2016 nationals in Montreal. Her team won gold at Westerns and fourth place in nationals in 2017, both times in Calgary.
The U16 and U19 teams have Westerns in Regina coming soon, which is a focus for now, but she also has long-term aspirations in the sport.
“Right now, I would like to make it to the NCAA in the United States,” she said. “Also, I’d like to make it to the PanAm team.”
With the kind of training path she’s on, she been making the first steps towards this goal.
