Meet Brenda Villa, Olympic Water Polo Player

Meet Olympic women’s water polo player Brenda Villa and her awesome Water Bonnet of Doom. Brenda is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant who, coming from a land-locked, arid town in Mexico, never would have dreamed her child would take up water polo:

Brenda, along with her older brother Edgar, soon began playing water polo as a diversion from swimming. Then she and her Latino teammates began winning junior tournaments, often defeating all-boys’ teams from more affluent areas.

Finally, Brenda became America’s best young women’s player, earning a scholarship to Stanford. And she began her third Olympics on Monday by scoring a goal in the United States’ riveting 12-11 victory over China.

U! S! A!

“I couldn’t have imagined it,” Rosario Villa recently said in an interview conducted in Spanish.

How could she? Rosario had never even heard of water polo, growing up in dusty Tecalitlan. When her kids said they wanted to join the Commerce team, “it was a little strange to me,” she said.

Dreams! They sprout through the caked, dry dirt of small Mexican towns, much like they do along the rusted-through ladders of inner-city fire escapes or wherever it is that mystical Latinos roam. Anyway. Let’s get into the spirit of the Olympics the best way we know how. With “Hips Don’t Lie.” U! S! A!:

Daughter of Mexican immigrants became a force in U.S. women’s water polo [The Olympian]