BRIDGEPORT, Pa. — Harvard University’s Matt Klinkenberg earns recognition as the 2025-26 Northeast Water Polo Conference (NWPC) Sports Information Director of the Year.
Selected by the league’s Director of Communications, the SID of the Year award is presented to individuals who “have achieved notable excellence in the field of water polo communications during the past academic year.”
A two-time SID of the Year in water polo with a previous Collegiate Water Polo Association (CWPA) Women’s Division I award in 2023-24, Klinkenberg joined the Harvard Athletics Department in August 2022, and served as an Athletic Communications Intern and Athletic Communications Assistant before being hired as an Assistant Director of Athletic Communications in September 2023.
A graduate of Emmanuel College, he earned his master’s degree from Boston College and served a variety of roles at Fenway Park.
Klinkenberg began his career in sports with the Edmonton Oilers’ media relations department.
The award marks the ninth honor bestowed exclusively to NWPC institutions following the division of the CWPA men’s teams into the Mid-Atlantic Water Polo Conference (MAWPC) and NWPC during the Summer of 2016. An award to the NWPC SID was not presented during the 2020-21 academic year due to multiple teams electing not to compete as a consequence of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Since the formation of the NWPC, Klinkenberg (Harvard, 2026), Joanna Dwyer (Princeton University, 2025), Lauren Dellipoali (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2023, 2024), Conor McGorry (Harvard, 2022), Max Berkowitz (MIT, 2020), Samantha Ralphs (Harvard, 2019) and Nicholas Dow (Brown University, 2017, 2018) have earned status as the league’s Sports Information Director of the Year.
