Growth Mindset Has Led Max Irving to Water Polo Stardom
One wakeup call occasioned another for Max Irving.
It was 2017, and Irving’s star was rising fast. He’d gone from a redshirt season at UCLA in 2013 to an All-American. That June brought his first U.S. national team call—in the FINA Intercontinental Tournament in Australia. In the fall, his outstanding season powered the Bruins to their third NCAA water polo championship in four years.
Amid that whirlwind, Irving had a sit-down with UCLA coach Adam Wright. The two had known each other for a long time, both hailing from Long Beach Wilson High’s storied program. Irving trusted Wright’s guidance for his own introspection of where Irving wanted to take his burgeoning career.
“Adam spoke to me about, ‘Do you know what you want to do? Are you interested in playing abroad?,’” Irving said recently. “And up until that point, I had never really considered it because I had been playing with the national team a little bit. He was like, ‘Hey, you’re getting opportunities to play with the national team now, and if this is something that’s a goal for you—to play in the Olympics—it kind of has to be something that you’re going to go all-in on.’”
It’s been nearly a decade since that heart-to-heart, and Irving has realized that promise and more.
His first European experience, playing with Italian club, Posillipo, at Wright’s connection, was an eye-opener as to what being a professional meant. But Irving, now 29, has made a career of courting discomfort and transmuting his vulnerability into excellence.
“I just knew I was going to sink or I was going to swim,” Irving said. “I just really wanted to put myself in a position where I was going to challenge myself personally and athletically on a daily basis.”
The path to polo
Irving was 7 or 8 when he laid eyes on water polo. An active child, he’d played basketball and soccer and swam. But he was mesmerized by his first exposure to polo, at a cousin’s game for the San Jose State women’s team. For a kid who could spend hours on roller skates firing shots at a net in a friend’s driveway, the mix of swimming and scoring was instantly attractive.
“When I first found out that there was a game that had a ball and a goal in the water, and you could do something in aquatics outside of swimming or diving, I was immediately intrigued,” he said. “It just kind of drew me in.”
A family history of basketball didn’t deter him. His father, Michael Irving, was a point guard at Rice University and is a Pac-12 men’s basketball official. By middle school, when Max Irving was playing sparingly for his basketball team, any pressure to follow in his dad’s footsteps organically dissipated, especially since he’d shown his skills in the pool.
It wasn’t long into Irving’s career that he became cognizant of how few of his teammates looked like him. It wouldn’t be unusual, at age 12 to 14, for him and his brother, Aaron, to be the only Black kids on a team. But he says he always found the environment in the diverse city of Long Beach welcoming. He took his status as ostensibly different as a challenge to prove himself.
“I always felt included, and that was a bit of a motivating factor for me because I wanted to be included because I belonged and I was able to be there and not just because, OK, we should include everyone and let everyone play with us,” he said. “I knew I could play. And I knew I had an eye for the game. But I wanted to prove that to everyone else.”
An impressive resume
In a sport prone to prodigies, Max Irving isn’t exactly a late bloomer. But his rise to stardom wasn’t necessarily ordained at Wilson.
He assembled a great career there, an All-CIF pick as a junior and All-American as a senior. He waited his turn at UCLA with the redshirt. By his sophomore season, he was the team’s second leading scorer with 47 goals, earning his first of two straight third-team All-America nods.
His senior season demonstrated the gritty all-around play upon which he makes his name: 40 goals, 27 steals, 14 assists and 12 blocks. For someone who admits—even now that he’s grown to 6-3 from his 6-0 listing at UCLA—that he’s not the tallest or fastest or hardest shooter, that tenacity helped him first earn his keep and then push him on.
Being around Wilson, alma mater of Wright and Tony Azevedo among many others, Irving always knew the pro path existed. But it was another thing to get there and live it.
“When you’re playing professionally, you’re playing professionally,” he said. “This is how people are making their living. This is how these coaches are making a living. So it’s very much a business, and you have to be extremely professional, and you have to be committed to your craft.”
His European voyage has taken him to Greece with Olympiacos and Hydraikos. He’s most recently spent time back in Italy with Telimar Palermo before transferring last summer to AN Brescia. All of it, Irving says, has been “pivotal and fundamental to my growth as an athlete” and as a person out of the water.
“You have to be in an environment where there are high-level teams, high-level players and high-level coaches,” he said. “To be able to play at the highest level in the years between the Olympics, the only place to really do that is Europe.”
Potential for growth
In an interview with the Associated Press in early 2024, U.S. national team coach Dejan Udovic provided a blunt assessment. Back in 2017, when he called Irving for the first time, if you had told him that Irving would grow into such a cornerstone, Udovic wouldn’t have bet on it.
Irving wears that distinction with pride. He understood that he was one of the last guys brought to the Gold Coast tournament in Australia, as the program reoriented itself a year after a 10th-place finish at the Rio Olympics. Irving didn’t think he performed all that well Down Under. But he and Udovic both identified areas for him to improve. The veteran coach saw in Irving the desire to get after those weaknesses, and Irving drew from Udovic the confidence to make changes.
“Dejan saw the potential I had,” Irving said. “He saw where I could go and—if I was going to continue to commit and get better and grow—the type of player that I could potentially grow into.”
Irving scored eight goals and nine assists as the U.S. finished sixth in Tokyo. He had 14 and 14 at the 2022 World Aquatics Championships in Budapest, then 16 goals and 24 assists in Fukuoka, the U.S. finishing sixth and seventh, respectively, at those tournaments. He added 11 goals and 17 assists in Doha in 2024.
A source of Inspiration
He’s done it as one of the few Black men in the elite ranks of a predominantly white sport, a difference magnified in Europe’s club scene. As Irving has ascended into ever more rare echelons for his sport, his pride as a trailblazer has grown.
He has a counterpart on the women’s side in Ashleigh Johnson, a global star who has also plied her trade in Europe. Irving’s push for inclusion has centered on the personal—through clinics and camps he hosts, where he seeks to put a face to the name and connect personally with young players of all backgrounds, as well as a seat on USA Water Polo’s board.
“It’s an absolute honor that I get to represent the African-American community and to be a source of inspiration,” he said. “I firmly believe that representation matters. And when you can see someone who you identify with competing at the highest level as a younger athlete growing up, that gives you a lot of motivation.”
Irving’s story of growth doesn’t belong to any one community. His embrace of challenges and his comfort in being uncomfortable, is instructive, regardless of sport or skin color.
“It’s time to be purposeful,” he said of his thinking upon leaving UCLA. “It’s time to be mindful. It’s time to, if I want something, I’m going to have to commit to it.”