BROOKLYN, N.Y. -- Iona College head coach Brian Kelly spoke with New York City based water polo journalist Michael Randazzo earlier this week about his current squad, the challenge of competing in a shallow/deep pool, coaching the Guerra quadruplets – two men and two women — and the state of Eastern water polo.

The fourth coach in the history of the men's program at Iona and founder of the women's program, Kelly has guided his alma mater since 1995. His total combined wins from the two programs make him the winningest coach in Iona College athletics history.

Under Kelly, the men's squad has been nationally ranked five times while on the women's side the Gaels have posted 16 consecutive winning records (1998 to 2013), claiming Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC) Championships in 2004, 2011, 2012 and 2013. 

The following interview has been edited. 

Michael Randazzo: Given your 25-year association with Iona water polo — first as a player and then as a coach for the past 21 seasons — could you be called the living embodiment of Gaels' water polo?

Brian Kelly: I wouldn't say that. There's a lot of the past and a lot of the present that I'm connected to. 

I was fortunate enough to start the women's team. We had a grant from USA Water Polo and got it up and running. It was my first year coaching the men and I was lucky enough to have teammates — I swam and played water polo at Iona. When I first started coaching the men I was on the swim team… there were girls in school who were teammates of mine and they urged me to start a women's team. They were sophomores and freshmen when I was a senior and [by the time] I started coaching they were seniors.

We did that but I didn't think I'd still be here 21 years later. 

Randazzo: How has Gaels' water polo evolved?

Kelly: It was a program that [early on] wasn't very well supported and probably that's the biggest difference to where we've come. We were run almost as a club team — I can remember going to tournaments and staying in people's houses and traveling in team vans. 

We've come a long way. We get as much as the next team at Iona. We have meal money for every trip, we take chartered buses wherever we go, and we go to California every single year with both programs. We get our fair share of athletic gear and apparel. When I was in school I literally did not have a water polo suit. We wore what we had for swimming and I think I might have gotten one t-shirt in four years.

We've had some great athletic directors that have picked up the program and supported us every step along the way. 

Randazzo: Both the men and women's teams compete in a shallow/deep pool, the Hynes Athletics Center Pool.

Kelly: Obviously, playing in a shallow deep facility is a challenge. It's something that we have to overcome and that our competition does not. But… we have a program, and that's the most important thing. If shallow deep facilities were not allowed there would be a lot less water polo teams playing. 

We're happy to have a water polo program here and to compete at the Division 1 level. Obviously we're not competing for National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championships but our men and our women have shown at times that we're able to compete at the national level and that we do very well with the facility we have.

Randazzo: When most people think of Iona they think of Gaels' basketball. How does this impact your program? 

Kelly: In regards to being a basketball school, I like to think of us as a cross-country school. Our cross-country team is one of the elite teams in the country and has been for twenty-something years. They've had two runner-up national championships at the Division 1 level and they've been a top-ten team for a decade running now.

Basketball is a complete positive. It's a high profile sport and when they're good it's an attention builder. You hear our name out there, you see us on ESPN, you see us in the [NCAA] tournament it helps us with recruiting. It gets exposure for the school and exposure for our program.

Randazzo: What is your greatest coaching accomplishment at Iona?

Kelly: I had the opportunity to coach my sister. To have her come to Iona and be a student athlete for four years and to coach her, she was part of our first women's team that qualified for [an] Easterns championship. That was one of the greatest moments of my life, that and starting a women's program and seeing it all the way through to three straight NCAA appearances.

Randazzo: You have a deep, young roster (24 players, two seniors, six juniors); what does the future look like for Iona men's water polo? 

Kelly: I would say we're in a rebuilding mode. It's not so much rebuilding the roster as it is rebuilding the attitude of the program. Unfortunately I had a rough two years where I wasn't here a whole lot [due to health and family issues]. I missed almost five months out of one year. You do that and it affects your recruiting, the way you're training, the way everything goes and —when you miss that much time — it really sets you back longer than you would think.

We're reinventing who and what our attitude here is. I think we're a year away; we have some really good recruits that we're looking at. My strength is in my sophomore class, which has been very good for us this year. We're obviously going to trim the roster down next year. It's too difficult to manage that many athletes in the facility we have. It will make for a more competitive team and it's going to make for a team that's ready to go on day one next year. 

Randazzo: Jake Lloyd –Iona's all-time leader in goals (322) and perhaps the best player to ever pull on the Maroon and Gold – graduated last year. How was he to coach and as an example of Iona water polo?

Kelly: You lose an All-American and a player that leads the country in scoring and our all-time leading scorer, that means a lot. We also lost another All-American last year in Ian Thompson. We had a really good offensive team last year. I was anticipating much better results from last year's team; defensively we just couldn't get it together. Then we graduated seven seniors last year. 

Jake was a tremendous athlete, pleasure to coach and one of the best players I've ever coached. It's always tough to lose a player of that caliber.

Randazzo: The Guerra quadruplets — Alexander, Alexandra, Andres and Andrea —are freshmen this year on the Gaels men and women's water polo teams. You're coaching all of them; how has that been? 

Kelly: The boys are identical and the girls are identical. It took me a solid month to be able to tell them apart.

The girls are doing a great job, the boys are both in the rotation, and they're helping us out tremendously. It means a lot to have a family like that here. Essentially this program was started off a family; five brothers from the Judge family played here and one of their sisters was a teammate of mine on the swim team. 

It's unique and it's obviously something I've never experience in my life.

Randazzo: When they're in the water with their caps on, how do you tell the difference between them? 

Kelly: I'm lucky; with the girls one's a goalie and one's a field player. When they put their caps on I have no problem making them out. With the boys one's lefty, one's righty. When they're in the water and they're not wearing their numbers [on their caps] it'd be really difficult to tell them apart. Once they get the ball in their hands it's easy.

Randazzo: How important is it to Iona water polo to be a national program? 

Kelly: It's extremely important. You want to play the best teams and the best teams are generally out west. On the men and women's side the top six teams every single year are from the West Coast.

Whenever we're really good here at Iona — I've had some men's teams that have gotten up to 13th in the country and our women have been nationally ranked seven – eight years in a row — it's fun going out to compete with some of these [Western] teams and seeing how long you can play with them. 

It's why you do it. You want to be competitive; you want to be able to challenge everybody you play. When you can do that you're successful.

Randazzo: But West Coast water polo is so dominant; can the East keep pace? 

Kelly: I don't know if that will ever even out. When you have the facilities they have, it's really tough to compete with… and you have the weather! To be able to play outdoors for 12 months of the year is a great experience. Having the history those programs have is similar to women's NCAA basketball. The University of Connecticut, University of Notre Dame, those types of teams on the women's side — it's really tough to compete with them.

UConn is getting the cream of the crop; they always will until there are more programs that step up to that level. 

That's the case with [West Coast] men and women's water polo. Those teams are so far ahead of everybody else. It's rare when you see a team like Pacific [currently the nation's second-ranked squad] enter that conversation… [like] they've been able to do the past couple of years.

In terms of an East Coast team doing that, it's really going to be difficult. I've played on teams and I've coached teams that have given them [West Coast teams] games… and have lost by a couple of goals to teams that have been top-four in the country. In terms of beating them it's going to be very difficult. 

I was at the NCAAs a couple of years ago and watched the Princeton team give UCLA an amazing game. I'm not sure if the ceiling for us on the East Coast is to play with these teams; if you can get that far why can't you beat some of them?

Randazzo: For the past two decades St. Francis Brooklyn has dominated Iona men's team. 

Kelly: As a player I never lost to St. Francis and as a coach I've never beaten them. There are two teams on the East Coast that I've never beaten as a coach. St. Francis is one of them and the other is Navy.

It's obviously frustrating, especially when [you look at] the scores of our games — over the past five years they've been really close. Down a goal at halftime, down two goals going into the fourth quarter, last year it was a one-goal game late. 

They're definitely one of the premier teams on the East Coast the past decade — they've gone to four NCAAs. It's a measurement of where you're at as a program. They're going to be challenging to represent the East this year; we're challenging just to get to Easterns. We've got five regular season games left in our division and we've got to try to win as many as possible or else we're not going to Easterns.

Randazzo: Wagner College announced last month that the Seahawks will field a men's team in 2016. How important is this?

Kelly: I think it's great for the sport. I'd like to see more teams added. One of the things that really hurt our sport is the men's championship dropping from eight teams to four. When that happened coincidentally we lost a lot of programs, especially in the East, after that. Title IX hurts us but only having four spots and two East Coast bids at the time hurt us. 

Right now the way the NCAAs are structured for both men and women, and the lack of an East Coast representative, like last year's championship, hurts the sport. The championship oversight committee wants to get the four best teams there [at the Final Four]. That's great for the short-term but in the long-term if you have the opportunity for an East Coast representative it's going to make the competition better. The East Coast will be better for that moving forward because more kids will want to play on the East Coast if they're going to be represented at the national championship.

Not having an East Coast representative on the men's side and dropping to only one representative on the women's side is definitely hurting the growth of our sport. 

I'd love to see all the MAAC add men's water polo. It's an inexpensive sport and as proven by St. Francis, Wagner and Iona, if you have a shallow deep program you can run a program.