Pasala (pass it). Tirala (shoot it). Duro (hard). Echale ganas (play with heart.
Jack Martin heard some of these phrases in Spanish when his water polo team played Tijuana Tritones and Baja. And though his upbringing is all in suburban San Diego, in some way the Bishop’s eighth-grader could cross a frontier as he could decipher some of what his opponents were calling out with the Spanish he has learned in school.
“They speak entirely in Spanish,” says the 6-foot-1-inch tall center, only 13 years old playing against water poloists much older than himself. “When they play, it’s fun to be able to understand some of what they’re saying to each other.”
“I’ve never been to a Spanish-speaking country,” says the sandy-haired lefty. “Someday I definitely want to go.”
The other boundary-breaking that young Martin, who also dabbled in basketball this year with the Knights’ middle school team, has done was at age nine facing off with 14-year-olds in the pool.
“When I first started, this is what happened. The older players I went against weren’t all top-level players. Now it’s totally different. I was on an (Olympic) development team, and they were all top players.”Besides his size, Martin’s natural southpaw abilities make for an advantage. Opponents have to adjust to defending the rare left-hander. Now, with training, he has developed skills with both hands, further complicating defense of him in his two-meter position in front of the goal.
“I’m close to ambidextrous on my back shot,” he says, referring to a shot in which the offensive player, facing away from the net, quickly flicks the ball backward. “I have just about the same ability with either hand.
“It kind of came naturally. I started out right-handed on the back shot, even though I shot left-handed on regular shots.”
The future Knight high-schooler, who will train under Bishop’s coach Doug Peabody this summer on the San Diego Shores club team, shows himself to be outgoing and enthusiastic, a typical middle-school student who carries on a busy schedule.
“That’s the picture I try to paint of myself,” he says, seated in the campus student center taking care of homework and other responsibilities after a long day, “friendly.”
He tells how, in his participation in the Olympic Development Program (ODP) at a tryout camp in Irvine, he roomed with three other young players. “I’m now really good friends with all of them.”
“It’s a good experience. With water polo, it helps you make connections. I know people from Connecticut I wouldn’t have known without water polo.”
Maybe this portends for “water polo diplomacy” in future years, the way ping pong players went to China to help pave the way for a normalization of relations with that world power.
A reporter catches the part-time baseball player on a three-day break from water polo, one of the less busy periods of his year. With a laugh and three siblings, Sierra, a ninth-grade water polo player for Bishop’s, Charlie, a fourth-grader into soccer and baseball, and Henry, a first-grader who is still a free agent, Jack tells his mom Sandy making up the family schedule. “It takes her half an hour to make it up, then she sends out an email.” he chuckles.
“Basically, my life is hectic. I have to be somewhere all the time,” he says. But, he adds “it’s not bad.” He says he enjoys water polo, though it now comes at a much more serious level. Mom’s taxi is humming, while Dad, Sean, an attorney, presumably keeps everyone on an even keel. Martin’s mother measures only 5-foot-3-inches, and father 5-foot-11-inches, so, “I got my height from cousins. There are some tall people in the family.”
Regarding his favorite subjects in school, his math teacher, David Johnson, also a soccer and volleyball coach at Bishop’s, “is an insanely nice person,” Martin says. “He makes math class fun. In my opinion, that’s hard to do.”
“He’s a really good guy, and a really good teacher,” says his apt pupil.
In Spanish class, “I have learned so much this year” from teacher Carlos Martel. “It’s a really fun class. It’s interactive. He’s also my advisor. There are 12 or 13 students in our advisory. We meet for five minutes at the start of school, plus sometimes later in the day. Every day the schedule rotates.”
The middle-schooler developed his Spanish vocabulary with a group project in which he and classmates created comics. His group made up a story about a surf competition, and they had to include the present progressive tense and other things they had learned. Of course, the positive youth comments, “It was fun.”