From swimming newbie to starting a new UWH club: Underwater Hockey in Indonesia

a story by Christianto Sahat

 The beginning

I was not really able to swim before I started playing UWH. Before that, I learned to swim from video and watching people. Beginning of 2008, I started looking for a sport, a team sport, that involve swimming, to improve my swimming skill. Well, exercising alone in a pool was not really a choice for me… you know, that weird feeling felt by a swimming newbie whenever he surrounded by men with triangle-shaped body using Speedo swimming trunk I found Singapore Underwater Hockey club through internet, so I decided to give it a try. I showed up, learned the basic, played, and ended up swallowing a lot of pool water. The first few sessions were always hard for me even though gradually my water confident level up, and I was thinking to quit, until one day… I managed to do a swerve and bypassing a forward player. I found it amazing doing swerve underwater and it kept me playing. So unforgettable and I just felt that I wanted to repeat that action again. I knew since that time I like this game because of the challenge. The skills like swerve, tackle, and flick, are not easy to master. Not to mention you have to do it while estimating your remaining air, and pass the puck before pushing yourself to the limit, in order to be able to recover faster on the surface. Opponents come not only from left, right, forward, back, but also from above your head. I played until 2009, then I stopped playing because I always came late from work. 2010, I came back to my hometown, Jakarta, Indonesia, to start my own business.

Jakarta Underwater Hockey formed

Back in Jakarta, I was looking for local club that played UWH. Surprisingly, I didn’t find any. So I joined few diving forums and started inviting everybody to try this game. The first game was on August 2010, and only 4 people showed up. For the next few months, not so many people really hooked up with this game. Even sometimes I ended up alone. This condition changed with arrival of new enthusiast players, Katarina Aquino, Eri Wibisono, Paula Florina, and Arif Junus. Since then, participants grew, and currently we have about 15-20 regulars, with 40% women and 60% men, age between 16 to 40 years old. We play twice a week, Monday and Thursday, 2 hours per session. We came up with a name : Jakarta Underwater Hockey Club ( JUHC ). We have organized 2 events so far, underwater hockey exhibition to Semarang ( another city in Indonesia, about 500 km from Jakarta ) on March 2011 with 40 registered participants, and Jakarta Spat n Splash on May 2011, with 45 registered participants.

The first event was to encourage a new uwh club to be formed, and the second event was friendship games between Singapore and Jakarta UWH club. Second event was quite big, luckily we were supported by Banyu Biru Explorer and DoyanJalan.org. As of now, there are about 3 representatives from 3 provinces have tried this game, so we expect another 3 uwh clubs in the coming months. In Indonesia, we use to have dinner together after the game, sometimes birthday party, karaoke, even some members have arranged for diving trip. We expect to have more get-together event, to be more emotionally bonded…

 Who knows, love will blossom between members… :p