Emily Ausmus

Emily Ausmus has earned this charmed life, just 19 years into being. She’s in Fremantle, Australia, seated outside beneath blue skies and swaying palms, a warm winter sun caressing her skin as she chills comfortably in a white tank top.

Along with her Team USA water polo teammates, the Riverside, California native is keen to experience the land Down Under.

“Today we have a little bit of time off,” Ausmus says via video call. “So we're just exploring here in Fremantle. There's a little bit of a farmer's market and stuff like that. So it's been super fun.

“It's so nice to be on Team USA. You get to travel to places like Australia where you get to explore and see the different ways of life, culture, stuff like that, different ways of driving on different sides of roads.”

The women’s water polo national team is training with the Aussies and Italy, among the top programs in the world. The U.S. squad’s demographics are shifting younger, after a run that saw them win three consecutive Olympic golds before finishing fourth in Paris 2024. 

Emily is part of the youth movement. Yet still a teen, she’s also quickly earning veteran status as she’s been part of the program since she was 16, and on the radar since she was 12.

In such a compressed timeline, she has made her Olympics debut, won World Championships gold, won Pan American Games gold, won gold at the youth World Championships and set the all-time scoring record at the University of Southern California — as a freshman.

Such talent isn’t a mixture of potions and spells. It grows over time, with ingredients like passion, hard work and inspiring role models.

Her brother, Evan, also a USC water polo player, set the standard for young Emily. She was 8 when her parents found carpooling to water polo classes at Riverside Community College more convenient than swimming classes.

“So my parents threw me and my brother Evan into water polo and we just fell in love with it. We were like, ‘We can't go back to following a black line for two hours,’” she says of the mundane swim class regimen. “We just fell in love with the physical aspect of water polo and the fun of throwing the ball in the back of the cage.”

Day after day, they returned to fulfill this youthful lust for sport. At the time, they would have no idea how the seeds of their future were planted in a robust environment for a sport most Americans only watch during Olympic years.

“Being in Southern California is such a blessing, obviously the weather and everything,” Emily says. “But it's such a mecca for water polo where there's so many competitive teams,” Emily says, “that are 20 minutes away from where you're training. So everybody knows each other.”

It’s an environment so competitive, so rich in talent and deep in opportunity, Emily estimates that she competed against 13 of her current national team teammates while growing up.

In fact, every player save two is from California. Ashleigh Johnson, the longtime star goalkeeper, is a Miami native. Jovana Sekulic was born in Belgrade, Serbia.

“We know each other so well, but with that comes a lot of competition. And, it's definitely a blessing to be surrounded by such competitors and especially in Southern California.”

And so, as her athletic journey began in the early morning shadows and beneath the blazing afternoons filled with fierce competition, the budding star begins her second Olympic quadrennial training cycle, with a chance to help Team USA return to the top of the podium at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.

At 12 years old, the prospect of representing Team USA in her hometown Olympics someday might’ve seemed like a far-off dream to Emily. But it wasn’t so far off for Team USA, even then.

As current USA Women’s Water Polo head coach Adam Krikorian told the team’s website in 2023, “Emily has been on our radar and a part of our pipeline for quite some time. From a young age, you could see her talent, but more importantly, her industriousness and eagerness to learn were the values that jumped off the page.”

Clearly, Emily wasn’t just any 12-year-old.

Imagine yourself at that age, playing the sport you were most passionate about. Then, imagine playing it not against your peers, but players up to seven years older than you.

That’s what Emily was doing when she was chosen to play for Team USA at the Pan American Junior Championships — her first experience with the national team program.

While that prospect would seem far too daunting to most, Emily took it in full stride — early evidence of an unwavering competitive spirit that has carried her to the pinnacle of water polo.  

“I think at the very beginning I was like, ‘I have nothing to lose’ type of energy. And I was just trying to make a name for myself and trying to win every play that I could, whether or not that was making a perfect pass to my teammate or getting open on a drive.”

Since then, she has been consistently finding success at every new rung of the Team USA ladder that she climbs.

Emily was first called up to the U.S. senior national team as an alternate in 2022 to train for the World Aquatics World Championships. She was still in high school — 16 years old. 

The call-up came after competing in a tryout against more than 50 athletes, many of whom she knew given that the water polo community is small. When she saw the long list of names on the email invite, her reaction was one of admiration and excitement.

“These athletes are such fierce competitors. They're so good. I've played against them. I look up to them. There [were] a lot of players in college, so just going into that tryout camp, it was very exciting for me and I think I took that energy and ran with it. I was just so excited to be there, and I competed every day so hard.”

It was that exact energy that she believes helped her secure a spot as an alternate, being “so young and so competitive and so hungry to be there.” 

When she first joined the senior team, she knew of the challenges that might come with her age. But she also knew she wasn’t the first to do it — and she drew confidence from that. Naturally, there were nerves, but she had people to lean on and the resources of Team USA at her disposal.

“We work with our [sports] psych a lot, just thinking about what's the task at hand and just the next-play mentality, we talk about that a lot. So just trying to really embrace that and take every game, every practice, and practice those mental notes that we try to emulate and that we talk about.”

The higher she climbs, though, the further there is to fall. Pressure builds, expectations increase, and the bar continues to be raised.

Emily felt it. 

One year after getting that first call-up to be an alternate on the senior team, the 2023 Pan American Games rolled around and she wasn’t on the roster. 

“I think I was scared to not make the team and kind of hesitated [during tryouts]. And instead of being the aggressive self that I am, I was a little bit more hesitant in the way that I played, the way that I interacted out of the water as well. And I think that really affected my play.”

She was quickly granted a shot at redemption, though, when another player was injured. Emily got the call. She wasn’t going to let the pressure get to her again.

“After not making that roster, that was kind of a realization for me and a switch in my mentality, of kind of just going for it.”

Since then, it doesn’t seem like that mentality has switched off. 

In fact, the unbridled energy of playing at the highest levels has since coalesced rather well with her natural competitiveness.

“Once you're in it, it's kind of just a go, go, go energy. And I think I really embraced that where if the person to my left and the person to my right is doing it, I kind of just think, ‘why can't I do it?’

“So I feel like I embraced that a lot through the full year. Like, ‘OK, if she's going that fast, why can't I?’ So that kind of competitive spirit that I have, I think really helped me at the end, to make that roster and be in Paris with those girls.”

The “Paris” that she speaks of is indeed the 2024 Paris Olympics, where she became an Olympian at age 18 — no doubt the greatest pressure yet, but one that she faced with energy and confidence.

Emily names her parents, Shawn and Shan, and her brother Evan as her role models. But she couldn’t help herself with a little fangirling at the Paris Olympics. While waiting in line for a bus, she spotted the purest shooter maybe in NBA history, Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors.

“I was like, ‘Oh. My. Gosh. He’s right there.’ And then I’m like, ‘Should I ask him for a photo?’ So finally I was like, ‘Can I get a photo?’

“He was so humble and so nice and very photogenic, obviously.”

It should come as little surprise that the rising water polo talent admires a scoring machine like Curry. What will surprise you is that Emily, who set the single-seasons scoring record as a freshman at USC, actually sees shooting as her weakness in the pool.

That’s right, cue the contortionist faces.

When she arrived on campus, the newcomer took note of a stat sheet that listed 104 goals as the previous all-time record. “Just seeing that, I was like, ‘Wow, that’s a lot.’ But I remember going back and looking at how many games we have and just looking at how many goals I had to score per game, and I was like, ‘Wow, that’s a lot goals.’”

A little math ensued, and she admits the idea of shooting for that record, of all the records she could attempt to own in year one of college, was overwhelming.

“What matters is the energy that I give forth. And every game, the effort that I give forth for my teammates, for my team, for my family, for myself. And yeah, I think going into this next season, I think just trying to be better than who I was my freshman year, I think that's one thing that I really try to embody is just being better the very next day.”

Of course, since we teased this earlier in the story, she took down the record, posting 114 tallies of her own. But when you’ve already been to the Olympics and met Steph Curry and done all these things, it comes across as another check mark, rather than something to scream from the mountaintops.

“I think it was really cool,” she says of breaking the record. “Cool freshman year. Very exciting. But I’m so excited to be back with those girls and to grind again.”

The Trojans, by the way, fell in the NCAA Championship game, losing to Stanford. So there’s still something to chase.

Emily sees herself as a versatile player. She’s known for having a high IQ in the pool. And as the summer rolls along, her game is now a canvas, and she’s painting as she goes.

“Hearing that I'm a very good scorer is very funny to me because I feel like growing up, I've always prided myself on defense and setting up my teammates and just reading what's in front of me and reading people, reading the pool, reading the goalie,” she says.

“Just learning from other shooters, other defenders, other goalies, how they react … every aspect of the game, I'm always trying to improve. But yeah, definitely my scoring ability, defense and I don't know, just embracing being a better player in all aspects of the game, at the end of the day.”