Coach Baller emerges from chlorine fog like a ghost with bones. He's donning a black Apocalypse Now cowboy hat as he inhales, "I love the smell of chlorine in the morning." He screams to the troops shivering in their Speedos, "You wanna play nice?" Nicolas and his teammates stare blankly. He continues, "Then don't play polo." A whistle blows. Bodies hit the water. There's a whole lot of splashing, grunting, and the occasional bing! of a ball hitting a skull at fifty miles per hour.

At the D-1 college level, you need to be under fifty seconds for a hundred-yard freestyle if you even want a prayer of keeping up with the other thoroughbreds in the pool; yes, it used to be polo, the old-school kind...until all the horses drowned.

Morning workouts are typically five to eight grand of just hard physical labor. Back and forth, back and forth. Proceeded by more back and forth. Plan on half of it being freestyle—breathing is optional. Swimming too slow? Throw in a few 200 flies, maybe some padding and tubing on your extremities as well. After an hour of this Disney vacation, there's typically a scrimmage (or eight) in which the team works on complex maneuvers: setting up penalty plays, positioning for fast breaks, and angling for mismatches where their 5'10" speedster is stuck on your 6'10" goliath.

Turns out, you can't dribble the ball in water polo. (Source)

Shockingly, the surface appears pretty smooth. In reality, these are ducks swimming in a pond where all the violent paddling is below the surface as parents observe from the deck.

Eventually, the scrimmage yields a winning team; the losers take out the goals and cover the pool as each player begins his daily 7,000-calorie sojourn to maintain that lowly 9% body fat. This was just the morning workout; afternoons are usually twice as tough and long. Nicolas remembers that in high school, you added games in the fall season twice a week with various championship sets for a half dozen weekends. In college, the same rules apply, only the players are bigger, faster, and meaner.

Nicolas makes his way to the dining hall and throws a two-grand breakfast (calories) into his face. He pats his stomach contentedly and waddles to class: Business 101. Here, he fights the great urge to sleep, induced by the monotonous lecture of the brilliant (but unenthusiastic) Nobel-prize winning professor, combined with his body's futile attempt to digest such an enormous load of carbs all at once.

Nicolas did well in high school, but college is a whole 'nother ball game. He didn't take any AP classes in high school, so he's not used to the fast pace and intense amount of work. Before, he could get by just paying attention in class and maybe filling out a worksheet to prove he was paying attention. When midterms and finals rolled around, going over his notes was enough.

"Although, he was pretty confident his teammates wouldn't catch on."

In college, on top of grueling practices every single day, he's also expected to carry a full workload and hours upon hours of homework. Reading? Writing essays? Punctuation? Nicolas would rather spend an hour in the cage and risk earning a bad nickname.

So yeah, free time—let alone an active social life—was pretty much out of the question for Nicolas. It was alright, though; the camaraderie among his teammates made up for those nights holed up in the library. Kind of.

Bonk.

Startled, Nicolas jerks his head up and realizes he had nodded off and slammed his forehead on his desk. Well...that's embarrassing, he says to himself. He shakes off the startled toddler expression from his face and pretends he was concentrating on the lecture the whole time. He fleetingly locks eyes with a girl from across the room, who smiles knowingly. Sigh. Nicolas wished he had time to date seriously, but nope. Not a chance.

At noon, Nicolas joins his teammates in the room of doom, aka the weight room. Yes, you pick up heavy things and you put them down, but polo training is not about bulk. It's about fast break endurance strength. Nicolas does twenty reps of ten different exercises each with thirty seconds rest in between...five times around the circuit. Session-end vomiting: optional.

Garbage in, another grand or so and three hours later, the afternoon practice starts. Time for hardcore games. Nicolas and his teammates do thirty minutes of sprints, leg abuse, and deck isometrics. Since it's a warm climate, they do these in their speedos, and while the concrete makes red marks on their bodies, the pheromone propagation is a magnet for a spectacular social life. (But only on his off-days.) Nicolas got used to this part quickly.

They divide into teams A and B. Remember, starters are not welded to the bench; play lousy for a few weeks, and you'll likely lose your starting slot to the player hungrier than thou. Competitive coaches often view practices with real-time game simulations as perpetual auditions to determine who really has game.

One of those people who like to hang out at the goal and wait for a free pass without doing a job on defense? There's a nice slot on the bench hauling towels for you.

Not doing enough sit-ups so that when you throw the ball at the goal, you hit the lower cross bar all too often? Expect the coach to hand you the stack of caps and balls to haul around the deck.

So Nicolas had his work cut out for him.

Nicolas' typical day is torture, but he knows that Coach has to be brutal. It's not fair to the other players who eat nails to win. And it's not fair to the school who pays Coach to bring home victories. If you don't want to feel like a semi-professional water polo player where the coach basically owns your typical day, then either find a different sport to play not on scholarship or write back to crazy Uncle Larry and maybe he can help you cover the outrageous cost of college.

In the locker room, Nicolas packs up and gets ready for his last class of the day: Macroeconomics 50B. He checks his watch and decides he'll take his sweet time walking there. It's all smooth sailing from here...until tomorrow, at least.