Water basketball is a water sport which mixes the rules of basketball and water polo, played in a swimming pool. Teams of five players each must shoot at the goal with a ball within a certain time after gaining possession.
In the USA, Brazil, and Europe, some amatorial matches are organized to develop this sport.
In 2005, the Italian Federation of Basketball recognized it as a form of basketball.
In the Netherlands, people have been playing water basketball (known there as waterbasketbal) since the 1970s. In the Netherlands it was played by people with a handicap. Besides regular tournaments, they also organize a national championship where the best teams compete for the official Dutch Waterbasketbal championship title.
Famous quotes containing the words water and/or basketball:
“‘Tis not enough on roots and in the mouth,
But give me water heavy on the head
In all the passion of a broken drouth.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)