The Cal 100 -- No. 68: Heather Petri
We count down the top 100 individuals associated with Cal athletics, based on their impact in sports or in the world at large – a wide-open category. See if you agree.
No. 68: Heather Petri
Cal Sports Connection: Petri played four seasons of water polo for the Bears, starting in 1997, helping them to a pair of NCAA runner-up finishes.
Claim to Fame: She is the only Cal female athlete to appear in four Olympics and the only Golden Bear to win an Olympic medal in four separate Olympics.
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Even among Cal sports fans, Heather Petri is not a household name. Maybe she should be.
Petri has a distinction no other Golden Bear female athlete — past or present — can claim: She is a four-time Olympian.
That’s an impressive achievement that required her to remain elite in the sport of women’s water polo over a span of a dozen years. She made her first U.S. Olympic team in 2000, something of a surprise selection while she still a Cal undergrad.
Then she represented the country at the Olympics again in 2004, 2008 and 2012.
Heather Petri
Photo by Kirby Lee, USA Today
And she came home with hardware each time, helping Team USA to silver medals at Sydney in 2000 and Beijing in 2008, a bronze at Athens in 2004 and, at last, a gold medal at London in 2012.
That makes Petri the only Cal athlete ever to win medals in four separate Olympic Games.
Born in Oakland and raised in the East Bay community of Orinda, Petri showed a passion for water polo from an early age. Miramonte High School didn’t have a girls water polo team when she arrived, so she played with the boys until helping convince the school to sponsor a team for girls.
She moved on to Cal in 1997 where she played for coach Maureen O’Toole, a Golden Bear alum and silver medalist at the 1978 World Championships.
Petri was a good player at Cal but not yet a great one. In four seasons (1997-99 and 2001) while playing on teams that twice were runners-up in the NCAA tournament, she never made the first-team All-Mountain Pacific Sports Federation team, much less first-team All-America. She was a second-team All-America selection as a junior before stepping away from the 2000 Cal team to train for the Olympics.
Petri continued to evolve as a defender and was a member of the U.S. national team for 13 years. She helped Team USA win three gold medals at the Pan American Games, golds at three World Championships and multiple World League crowns.
The USA water polo website described Petri this way:
Intangibles have no place on a scoresheet but they are one piece of what turned Heather Petri into a four-time Olympic medalist. . . . A top-notch defender with excellent speed, Petri brought positive energy and an upbeat personality that served as the glue on several iterations of Team USA.
Following her Cal career, Petri compete for a variety of professional clubs in Brazil, Greece and Italy, winning two European Champions Cup titles. She scored four goals in the 2012 Super League Final.
A Cal assistant coach the past seven years, Petri earned a spot in the Cal Athletic Hall of Fame in 2013, the same year she had her cap retired by the Bears' program. She was named to the Pac-12 All-Century team in 2016 and in 2018 was inducted into the USA Water Polo Hall of Fame.
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Cover photo of Heather Petri, second from left, celebrating with her 2012 gold-medal winning Olympic teammates by Andrew Weber, USA Today.
Follow Jeff Faraudo of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jefffaraudo