Journey to an Olympian
Ashleigh Johnson is an American water polo player who is considered by many to be the best goalkeeper in the world. She was part of the American national team that won the gold medal at the 2015 World Aquatics Championship. In 2016, she became the first African American woman to make the U.S. Olympic team in water polo. She was part of the gold medal-winning 2016 and 2020 U.S. women’s water polo Olympic teams and earned a spot on the 2024 U.S. women’s water polo Olympic team.
Early Life
Johnson’s parents are Donna and Winston Johnson, both of whom were born in Jamaica. She was raised in Miami by her mother, Donna Johnson, along with her three brothers and one sister, all of whom play water polo. While all her siblings loved aquatics, Ashleigh did not share their passion.
Ashleigh said, “yeah, I did not like swimming. Swimming was not my thing. Swimming was kind of what you had to do, and water polo was the reward. We’d go to school – actually, elementary school – walk across the park, and then we’d go from swimming practice to water polo practice. So, it was just our endless cycle, day to day – school, park, swimming, water polo. And oOver time I fell in love with the sport.”
High School
At Ransom Everglades High School, she was a four-year letter winner and was a starter on her school’s water polo team guiding them to three consecutive state championships.
As a senior, Johnson committed to play water polo at Princeton University.
Collegiate career
In her first year she was named Third Team All American, while earning Honorable Mention as a sophomore in 2014, and Second Team as a junior in 2015.
In 2017, Johnson graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, majoring in psychology.
Johnson finished her collegiate water polo career as Princeton’s all-time leader in saves (1,362). During her time at Princeton, she compiled a 100-17 win-loss record with a .693 save percentage. She was the first Princeton women’s water polo player to be named first team All-American and she was the third ever to be selected All-America in each of her four seasons. She was a 19-time Collegiate Water Polo Association (CWPA) Defensive Player of the Week award winner, a four-time first-team all-conference player and the CWPA Player of the Year.
2016 Summer Olympics
Johnson was the first African-American woman to make the U.S. Olympic water polo team when she made the team for the 2016 Summer Olympics and they won the gold medal.
Italy and Greece
In 2018, Ashleigh was hired by the Orizzonte Catania, the most titled club in Europe. For the 2021-22 season, she was the goalkeeper of Greek Ethnikos Piraeus, a club with big traditions in Greek water polo.
2020 Summer Olympics
Johnson competed on the U.S. Olympic water polo team in the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics, held in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, winning a gold medal. She made 80 saves, which was more than any other goalkeeper in the women’s and men’s tournaments.
2024 Summer Olympics
Team USA played against Greece, winning easily while Johnson only gave up 4 points. Head Coach, Adam Krikorian, has said of Johnson “she’s an incredible athlete. She’s got great hand-eye coordination, great reflexes and reactions. And then she’s fiercely competitive – fiercely. And, you would never know it by her demeanor or by the huge smile on her face. But to us, on the inside, we know how driven she is to be one of the best to ever do it.”
Fitting In
As the only Black player and the only person from the East Coast, Johnson shared her transition was tough and the pressure to play on the Olympic team added even more. Her coach encouraged her to embrace her role model status: “it really took me understanding the bigger context of not only our sport, but access to aquatics, the historical exclusion of people of color from aquatics spaces, and it took all of that to start writing a new history, start writing a new story, start opening up that pathway for the people who will follow me”, Johnson said, “the girls and boys who look like me – to gain that confidence that maybe I didn’t have, that dream that I didn’t have because I didn’t see a lot of people who looked like me in this space.”
Johnson encourages younger athletes saying, “We belong in the pool.” She shared “a lesson that I wish I had heard when I was young, was that your difference is the thing that’s going to add to the team. It’s going to set you apart, and it’s going to make your team better. Like, I play this game differently. I look differently than most people in my sport. I tell a lot of kids who, like, tell me that they don’t feel like they fit into their team – and I’m like, you keep being you. Your difference makes you great. Your uniqueness is an added value, and it takes all types.”
Flava Flav and Reaching People of Color
In Paris, she has joined with the team’s “hype man,” rapper Flava Flav to raise the visibility of water polo especially in the Black community. Johnson said, “I don’t think people of color have had adequate access to aquatic spaces, and you can see it in the way our sport looks, see it in the way swimming looks. It’s not representative of the U.S. in terms of diversity. One of the biggest barriers for people of color in water spaces, not just water polo, is the story that they don’t belong here. So, talking about it and saying you do belong here, seeing a man who’s a rapper, who’s not even part of this space get so passionate and invested in a team like ours, I think is life changing. I think that’s one of the things which will break down barriers.”
Objective Fourth Consecutive Gold in Paris
Their next game on their quest for their fourth straight gold medal is the quarterfinals match against Hungary on Tuesday, August 6. Hungary, historically a water polo powerhouse, defeated the U.S. in group play in 2021, but the Americans responded with four consecutive wins, including a 14-5 victory over Spain in the final. While the competition in Paris is fierce, the U.S. team remains a formidable contender.
