Denny Harper, the UC San Diego men’s water polo coach from 1980 to 2021 and a member of the USA Water Polo Hall of Fame’s 2025 class, said he began coaching when he was in high school.
Growing up in Orange County in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Harper was a “classic” football and basketball kid who spent his summers surfing off the coast of Newport Beach.
But during his freshman year at Rancho Alamitos High School in Garden Grove, Harper said he developed Osgood-Schlatter’s Disease — an overuse injury common in growing teens — which caused pain in his knees.
“I couldn’t play football,” Harper said. “Which was at the time the most devastating thing that had probably happened in my life — I cried for about a week or so, and then I got a visit from a guy named Tom Moore.”
Moore was the captain of the high school water polo and swimming teams, and he asked Harper to try out for both.
Harper said he still wanted to play football and wasn’t thrilled about Moore’s proposal.
According to Harper, water polo was a competitive sport in Orange County in the early 1970s — but it had not yet exploded in popularity, as it would over the next two decades.
But he gave the sport a shot.
“I stuck it out and things kind of kicked in for me my sophomore year,” Harper said.
Then, during his junior year, a group of girls who wanted to start a water polo team asked him to be their coach.
According to Harper, he wasn’t sure why they asked him, although he was the captain of the boys water polo team — and a captain of every team he’d played on growing up, regardless of the sport.
There were only a few high schools near Garden Grove with girls water polo teams at the time, Harper said, but he began scheduling games using his family’s rotary phone.
Harper said that after the initial shock of being in charge of his peers and friends, he found himself taking the role of managing the team pretty seriously.
“We wanted to get better,” Harper said. “We wanted to win.”
After high school, Harper played water polo for two years at Santa Barbara City College, where he met his best friend, Russ Hafferkamp, a fellow member of the USA Water Polo Hall of Fame.
In 1976, Harper transferred to San Diego State University, where he played for the men’s varsity team.
While playing for the men’s team, Harper was approached by a former player of his from high school, who asked him if he would coach the school’s fledgling women’s club team.
Harper agreed, and ended up coaching the women’s club team at SDSU for six years, from 1977 to 1983.
Harper said his SDSU women’s teams went 130-18, winning exhibition games over the US National Team and the Hungarian National Team, which was one of the world’s best at the time.
“We won a lot of tournaments,” Harper said of his years at SDSU. “We were pretty much the top dog.”
In 1980, while Harper was coaching the SDSU women’s team — and teaching at Horton Elementary School near Lincoln Park — Hafferkamp approached him and asked if he’d want to coach the UCSD men’s team as well. His friend, the UCSD men’s head coach, was leaving for another job.
Harper agreed.
He said he still has his $800 contract for coaching the UCSD men during the 1980 season — his first paycheck as a coach.
In 1983, UCSD asked Harper to coach the women’s varsity team as well.
He said his two or so years as the UCSD women’s coach were a little awkward because his athletes remembered his success at SDSU.
“They hated me because I always beat them when I was at San Diego State,” Harper said. “So they were like, ‘Why is he here?'”
But his loyalties had flipped. Harper said that as the UCSD women’s coach, his teams never lost to SDSU.
When USA Water Polo began sponsoring a women’s collegiate national championship in 1985, UCSD won the first three tournaments.
Harper said that women’s water polo in the 1980s was like the “wild, wild west.”
“I love that era of coaching women’s water polo,” Harper said. “Because everything was on a par. Nobody had any real money, it wasn’t really funded by any [athletic] departments. Coaches weren’t getting paid — it was for the love of the sport.”
After the UCSD women’s championship run from 1985 to 1987, they would win two more national championships under Harper, who stepped down following the 1999 season to focus on the men’s program.
As the UCSD men’s coach, Harper won 697 games and earned 15 national championship berths, placing second in the country in 2000 and third in 1995, 1998 and 2006.
Because water polo competed in an open division — rather than teams being classed as Division I, II or III — Harper said UCSD games were well attended.
According to Harper, the UCSD team improved when he became their coach because he gave his players an offseason conditioning program, moved their practices in 1981 from the indoor, shallow end pool at UCSD to the 50-meter pool at what was then Miramar Naval Air Station, and scheduled games that year against Cal and UCLA, two of the country’s best programs.
In Harper’s second season as the UCSD men’s coach, the program was ranked 10th nationally, which he said was unheard of.
“We were the first team at UCSD to prove you can play up,” Harper said, referring to his squad’s matches against USC, a DI powerhouse, while other programs at UCSD competed at the DIII level.
According to Buc Buchanan, a captain of the UCSD team in 1982, they placed 10th nationally in 1981 despite one player contracting meningitis and another being injured in a bike accident.
In an email, Buchanan said that when Harper arrived as the team’s new coach, “he came across as a confident man, a coach with a plan and a leader with a vision.”
Harper said that the COVID pandemic and an increasing number of administrative tasks influenced his decision to retire.
According to Harper, NIL deals will not become a big thing at UCSD.
“I just don’t see it happening,” Harper said. “It will deter from a long-standing philosophy that kids will still come, because they always have, to UCSD and they’re going to overachieve. Because they overachieve in the classroom … they overachieve in their sports.”
In his retirement, Harper still coaches the San Francisco Olympic Club master’s team during international competitions.
It wasn’t all about accomplishment during his UCSD days, according to Harper.
“If there were shenanigans happening in the ’80s at UCSD, I was the one who was called by [the UCSD athletic director] to somehow keep the boys from going to prison,” he said.
How does he describe those teams now? “A cross between Bad News Bears and the LA Raiders,” he said, “at their peak of Raider-ness.”
