Swimming with Sticks

Jason LaPenta was a regular player of underwater hockey at his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Now an electrical engineer at Lincoln Laboratory, he missed the game and thought it might be just the kind of intense, offbeat sport that could thrive at MIT.

Underwater hockey began in 1954 in England with a game called "Octopush," which diver Alan Blake invented to keep local diving club members active during the winter, but which soon began to spread throughout Europe. Participants don snorkel masks and fins and use short, curved sticks to chase a 1.4-kilogram, plastic-coated lead puck around the bottom of a pool. Teams score when the puck lands in the goal, which is a 1.8-meter-long metal tray at the bottom of the pool.

Underwater-hockey players "play very seriously, especially in other countries," LaPenta says. By last spring he had rounded up enough potential players to seek Graduate Student Council funding for a club sport.

The newly named MIT Underwater Hockey Club, a division of the Scuba Club, then secured practice time in the new Zesiger Center pool. As word spread, the club grew to about 50 members. They now practice weekly against each other, hoping that in the future they'll have the chance to compete against other teams.

Wendy Gu, a graduate student in bioengineering, played one game and was hooked. "The action is fast paced," she says. "I'm exhausted after each game, but it's a satisfying sort of exhaustion."