‘Jumping for joy inside’: La Salle water polo gives star player Kalista and her father Tom Hyham a family reunion

Kalista Hyham can’t get her coach’s attention during practice at La Salle’s Kirk Pool.

“Tom!” she shouts. He doesn’t turn around.

“Tom!” she tries again. Still no response.

“Dad!” she yells.

“Yeah?” answers Tom Hyham, La Salle’s water polo head coach.

After four years at Bucknell, where Kali finished sixth all-time in goals and fourth all-time in ejections drawn, she had the option to use her COVID-19 fifth year of eligibility. Although she talked to other coaches and looked at other schools, she ultimately ended up choosing La Salle, where her father coaches.

The transition to La Salle from being an honorable mention All-America player at Bucknell has gone well. She leads the 19-11 Explorers in goals and has gotten reacquainted with playing for her father.

“Growing up, I had friends that would call their parents by their first names, but I was just never that person, I would always call my parents Mom and Dad,” Kali, a center, said. “As soon as he started coaching me, I tried to always call him ‘Tom’ on the pool deck. It is funny, though, he has really terrible hearing, and it’s really hard to hear inside indoor pools. He answers to ‘Dad’ so much quicker.”

Her father agrees that the name change is a bit strange.

“She calls me ‘Tom’ a lot and it’s weird for me to hear it,” he said. “Back in the old days, before she started college, some of her friends on the team would call me ‘Coach Dad.’”

Tom knew his daughter would be recruited by a plethora of coaches, and he encouraged her to remain open-minded and give other programs a chance. But he can’t deny that he was quietly rooting for Kali to join him at La Salle.

“For me, it was like, ‘You’ve got an extra year of eligibility, you’re coming to La Salle. Let me know when you make your right decision,’” he said.

Coaching a respectable program that’s a newer team on the East Coast water polo scene, Tom is finding joy in being able to coach Kali in her final year of collegiate water polo.

“Being able to coach her for her last year of what will probably be high-competitive water polo … as a dad, that’s really all you can ask for,” Tom said.

It’s special for Kali as well, seeing as her father was more in the stands of water polo games growing up rather than on the deck coaching her. The Hyhams are a water polo family, with older sister Tori having played and now serving as La Salle’s team manager, and younger sister Marina currently an honorable mention All-America goalkeeper for Marist. Kali had played on the club water polo that Tom coached in Huntington Beach, Calif. And while Kali was a sophomore at Bucknell, Tom came to the state as well when he got the La Salle job in 2018.

“We get to spend a lot more time together, because obviously over the last four years, I’ve been away at school playing under a different coach, in a different city, a different state for part of it,” she said. “It’s been a new, fun challenge.”

Tom highlighted the fact that coaching Kali at 23 years old is a much different experience than coaching her before college when he would coach his daughter and her friends. Having such a seasoned player on his team means Kali is much more than just another player in the pool.

“She’s really more of a player-coach now,” Tom said. “I lean on her for a lot of things, and she’s one of the smartest people on the team and honestly one of the smartest people I know. I’m not just saying that because I’m her dad. It’s easy to lean on her.”

While they’re ecstatic to be on the same side now, Tom still reels from the way his daughter has flourished in college.

“She went into Bucknell her freshman year, and [Bucknell coach John McBride] asked her to play a position that she had never played before,” Tom said. “It’s one of the toughest positions that you can play; it’s genuinely the player that gets beat up the entire game. And she said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it.’ And he said, ‘Until we get another center, we’re gonna work you out there.’ Well, for four years, she played center. And to see her get on those all-time lists and be the highest-scoring center in the NCAA over certain years … that, to me, was remarkable, as a dad.

Smiling fondly, he added: “It’s funny because I watch her play now, and I look at her differently as coach than I do as a dad. In practice, I’ll see her get the ball in her hand, and all of a sudden, there will be four girls surrounding her trying to drown her, basically, and the ball will just flip out of her hand and into the goal. And I’m still, to this day, amazed at some of the things she’s capable of doing. So, as a coach, I’m not very reactionary to it. But, as a dad, I’m jumping for joy inside, like, there’s not another person I know that can make something like that happen.”

Despite all of the great plays, highlight reel-worthy goals, and teasing about calling her dad by his first name, being together at La Salle means the world to Tom and Kali. It entails big things like continuing to elevate the water polo program to new heights and put it on the same competitive level as East Coast powers and fellow Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference programs Wagner and Marist. Playing for Marist, Marina recently helped lead her team to two wins against La Salle.

The little things are just as meaningful.

“Before [Kali] went to college, I had never missed a game. Even when she was in college, I tried not to miss any games as much as I possibly could,” Tom said, a grin playing on his face. “This way, I don’t miss any games.”