Introduction

At Trinity, there was a surplus of water sports. One of them was water basketball. Water basketball is played with water polo rules, but uses baskets instead of goal nets. There was also water polo, swimming and diving, and inner tube water polo. Gary Colberg (pictured below) invented inner tube water polo (ITWP) in 1969 at University of California Davis. It is pretty self-explanatory - it is water polo where the players are in inner tubes instead of treading water. Because this sport is less rigorous, it is more accessible – making it a perfect intramural (IM) sport. It did not take long for this sport to spread across the country. The first mention of inner tube water polo at Trinity is in the 1976 Mirage. Unfortunately, its last mention was in the Mirage was 2000. However, 24 years of an intermural sport is impressive! It was a co-ed sport. While UC Davis does have official rules, they vary from school to school. For example, a rule at Trinity was that a goal scored by a female was worth more than one scored by a male. It was also 7 on 7 here at Trinity. I chose to focus on the females who played innertube water polo – specifically the females in Gamma Chi Delta.