Thousands of moms everywhere do the thankless job of running the kids to practice, whatever practice for whatever sport or art form has inspired their children. Few can expect to be recognized for their efforts. But for one such mom - perhaps the only one - that recognition is an Emerging Filmmaker Award from the Lake Placid Film Festival, and Water Polo Mom Dawn Young has only herself to thank for that one.

Wolf Wigo, Captain of the 2000 and 2004 USA Olympic Water Polo teams, has spent most of his 32 years in the water. His mother has captured his aquatic exploits in her documentary: WATER POLO: BENEATH THE SURFACE.	For over 25 years, Dawn Young followed her children's swimming, then water polo progress with her various cameras. She has turned her memories into an award winning documentary entitled WATER POLO: BENEATH THE SURFACE

Dawn Young’s devotion to the sport began when children Lauren and Wolf Wigo were very young. In those days it was swimming. She was up early every morning, fought the urge to remain protected by blankets from the predawn frigid temperatures, and escorted her intensely focused youngsters through dark streets, past the saner minions who continue to sleep until some civilized hour, to the swimming pool. By 7:30 every practice morning, Dawn had been at that job for three hours, and she still had to get to school where she was a fulltime French teacher.

All of which made Dawn Young no different from the many parents driven by their offspring’s’ passion for sports whose practice times are, by necessity, always scheduled in the wee hours of the night and morning when “normal” people are not renting the facilities. Young surrendered to the forces that drove the children orchestrated her life by the clocks that officiated over theirs. What made Dawn Young different was that she had the presence of mind and body to chronicle the journeys and to turn them into an engaging documentary film.

At the time, Young was an actor and a model and even after divorcing the children’s father and after taking a full time French teaching job to pay the bills, she had remained active in the industry. All the while the documentarian was at work. Year after year Dawn recorded footage. She recorded everything, including the summer vacations with her husband Jon Pousette-Dart at his family home on Nantucket and in Martha’s Vineyard. The camera took it all in; Dawn simply trusted that one day there would be a focus to the story, a real exposition, rising action, climax and resolution to be expressed through this medium.

Luckily for Dawn and for her film, Wolf provided the impetus for the filmic story when he dived into the world of water polo which called to him from who knew where but which led him eventually to three Olympics Games.

Wolf’s parents were both swimmers so it was only natural that he and his sister would want to jump in the pool at the West Side Y and compete with the Gotham Aqua Kings. When Wolf became “Swimmer of the Decade” at New York’s Bronx Science High School, it was clear where his talents lay. But having loved team sports and having perpetually carried a ball of some sort in his hands, bouncing it from every wall and storefront along the City streets, Wolf was thrilled to discover that he could combine swimming and playing ball into the ideal team sport. He chose his sport and decided that he would one day be on the US Olympic Water Polo team.

Young asserts, “He started swimming with the Gotham Aqua Kings in New York, where we lived, and for some reason he got turned on to water polo. I was a swimmer, so I knew where the swimming talent came from, but I didn’t know where he got the yen for water polo.”

Young asserts, “When he started it was really a struggle for him because there were no water polo teams for kids his age in the area. He had to scramble to find places to play.” At 13 years of age, he tried out for the New York Athletic Club team, and the coaches were very impressed with his competitiveness. They took him on even though he was much younger than the other players. Then Wolf amazed them with his dependability. He could always be counted on to help them make the 14 players they needed for a game at practice.

“On his own, Wolfie found the St. Francis Academy in Brooklyn which actually did have a program for boys his own age. Then it really got intense. He’d work out with the boys on Mondays and Wednesdays and then work out with the big guys of the NYAC in the early morning hours and on Saturdays. Before he was 15 and 16!”

It’s her son’s fighting spirit, his drive to excel, to push the limits of his abilities to which Dawn Young dedicates her film. “It’s my way of paying tribute to the thousands of kids around the country who give their all for the love of the game alone because there’s no money in it in this country. Wolfie was lucky and went to the Olympics. In fact, he went three times. That’s so rare.”

Most athletes never make it to that level. But there would be no sufficient competition to push the few that do make it to the top without the stouthearted perseverance of the other athletes who battle for the local, regional and national accolades and push the Wolf Wigos to continually stretch the limits of their own potentials.

Wolf set new boundaries for himself at every juncture. By the time he graduated high school he had earned back-to-back Utzinger Awards, the prestigious citation from the NYAC. He had already led his East Coast Annapolis 17-and-under team to a surprising victory over all the California teams at the Junior Olympics, a feat no East Coast team had ever accomplished before.

Later he was named to the Hall of Fame at the New York Athletic Club, but in the meantime, Wolf went on to Stanford in California, and there he began to have the back problems that plagued him his whole career. In spite of his pain, he proved his worth to the water polo team by being one of only 7 athletes in Stanford’s history to be named All American all four years; then, in 1995, along with swimmer Jenny Thompson, Wolf was named outstanding senior athlete.

In 1996, Wolf qualified for his first Olympics team. “Wolf was the only water polo player from East Coast to make a team in the 100-year history of water polo in the Olympics,” Young says, sounding more like the proud mother than the stalwart filmmaker.

“Anyway, that’s when it really got hard”, laughs the filmmaker. In the U.S., water polo is not a professional sport, and the players have to find jobs or other support to continue training. Finding jobs that fit with the training schedule is a real challenge. For a time between the ‘96 and the 2000 Olympics, Wolf found himself working in San Francisco trading stocks and options for the Pacific Stock Exchange, practicing there with local teammates during the week, flying south to Orange County on weekends to work out with the Olympic-bound teammates, and then returning Sunday evening for another week of work up north. The payoff was the second round of Olympic competition.

For our European counterparts, the world-class athletes compete professionally. Water polo is a popular sport, and the athletes are as popular as American baseball players. Our players do have the option to seek selection by a European team, and Wolf tried that route for a time. Between the 2000 and the 2004 Olympics Wolf was a star on the Ethnikos Piraeus team in Athens, Greece.

“Most people don’t know what a tough and grueling sport this is” groans Young. “That’s one thing I hope to have captured in my film. They train seven to eight hours a day, and they have to juggle work schedules, family time and everything else around the sport.”

There is little support for water polo. You rarely hear about the games from the broadcasters, and there’s no glamour for these Speedo-clad tough guys. The sport is rough, demanding, and the drive has to come from within in order for the players to remain committed.

Through it all Young was there first as a parent from the stands, her High 8 Hitachi camera keeping her company, providing her distraction by giving her something concrete to do rather than succumb to the nervous hours of nail biting, watching, hoping and cheering. She aimed her camera and began to tell a story whose ending the teams would have to create for her. Later, with her Sony and Canon mini DV cameras, Dawn followed the team around the world shooting as much as the coaches and players would allow, getting candids, posed photos, triumphs, defeats, bloopers, all of it. She got to the games, logged footage, and worked toward shaping her tribute to the heroic team.

This year at the Olympics, the end of the film began to write itself. “What a year this has been,” Dawn Young reflects. “ The film, the award at Lake Placid, Athens, and to top it off, Athena!”

Wolf retires this year from the national team, and his mother’s thoughtful paean to his tireless dedication to the sport is a special legacy she has created for him, for his sport, and, most triumphantly, for his brand new baby daughter, Athena, born during the 2004 Olympic games.

So now Young has her last act. The day before the Games began, in August, Wig suffered a broken eardrum when a teammate accidentally hit him during a practice session. Although eardrum ruptures are common among water polo players, they are extremely painful, and, of course the timing couldn’t have been worse for Wolf. To make matters worse, an unlucky draw placed the U.S. team in bracket A with the three veteran teams that would eventually medal, forcing the best teams to play against each other early on in the preliminaries, to vie for the top three slots and a go at the quarter finals. So, once again, there was no medal.

But the good news for America is that most of the team is very young (only three players had returned for the games this past August) and they should have a good chance for gold in 2008 with four more years’ experience and dedicated practice.

For now, the tour is over for Dawn Young. She will re-cut her film for the last time and prepare to submit it to a new round of festivals, and perhaps she’ll turn her attention to the next generation. Who knows where shooting Athena might take her.