Randy Franke

The most exciting thing to hit the Coggan Family Aquatic Complex in its short life was the FINA Women's Water Polo World League Preliminary Round I held June 30 through July 3, 2005. With the top women in the world, the event brought teams from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Greece (2004 Olympic Silver Medalist), Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Spain and the USA (2004 Olympic Bronze Medalist). The Super Final will be held in Kirishi, Russia, August 18-21, 2005.

Randy Franke, Coggan Family Aquatic Complex Aquatics Director, says the event came off without a hitch. "The event was a huge success," said Franke, "featuring some of the top women's water polo teams in the world."

"Events like this give us the opportunity to showcase our facility and community," Franke said. The Coggan Family Aquatic Complex opened in September, 2002. Franke has been Aquatics Director since the facility's opening. He started his aquatic career as a lifeguard/swim instructor 20 years ago, moving on to pool maintenance as a Certified Pool Operator and finally as Aquatics Director. "I was also a collegiate water polo player and swimmer at the University of California San Diego," he stated.

Water polo is, interestingly enough, the oldest Olympic team sport. According to FINA President, Mustapha Larfaoui, the two first Olympic women's water polo tournaments in 2000 (Sydney) and 2004 (Athens) increased its visibility worldwide, thus creating new dynamics and ways of development.

"FINA thought that the progress of women's water polo was worth this annual rendezvous and created the Women's World League in 2004," Larfaoui said. "With the new competition formula created this year, the media impact of the event will certainly be higher."

Franke agrees, explaining that "having international water polo games at our facility give U.S. Water Polo a chance to promote the sport of water polo and gives local kids the chance to meet and see some of the best players in the world."

CTS timing equipment was used at the event. "During the event we used the System 6 Sports Timer with a Mercury 16 main score board (80 x 96) and two auxiliary score boards (24 x 128 ) for penalties and (48 x 32) for secondary view of game time and scores," Franke said. "All the boards were controlled by a single Display Link laptop computer. US Water Polo also brought four of the new CTS Pro Pace/Shot Clocks to be used as shot clocks."

"The CTS equipment was able to do everything asked of it," Franke stated. "I would like to thank Nate Schilling from CTS who was able to program the System 6 to display all the information we wanted and able to resolve our scoreboard issue. He certainly made the CTS equipment shine."

Nate Schilling gives credit to the folks at the Coggan Family Aquatic Center. "What they did was really ingenious," said Schilling. "They used sections from their old Mercury matrix scoreboard and split it into two scoreboards so they could display information at both ends of the pool. Using the new Pace Clock Pro for shot clocks, there were bright, glowing red LEDs everywhere you looked. It works great."