The aim of this paper is to investigate the prevalence of injuries sustained by elite water polo players per their anatomic location, the way of occurring plus the player`s position in a team. Between January and June 2016, 92 players with an average age of 25.45 completed a questionnaire. 44.57% reported injuries occurring during the course of training, 26.04% claimed that injuries had a gradual onset and 7.6% of injuries occurred in the third quarter of the match. The lowest percentage of injuries (1.09%) occurred during the warm-up phase and 2.17% of injuries occurred in the first quarter of the match. Physical contact, as a cause of injuries, appeared in 41.30% of the cases and primarily to those playing in the centre-forward position where 66.67% were injured due to physical contact. Out of 32.61% of non-contact injuries, the most endangered position was the goalkeeper`s position with 66.67% of goalkeepers injured without physical contact from other players. The most frequent injuries occur in the shoulders (31.62%), and in the majority of cases was suffered by the whole set (40% of the whole set had this injury), followed by back injuries - 20.65%, also in the whole set (40% of them suffered from this injury) and finger injuries: (16.30%), most frequently sustained by goalkeepers (20% of goalkeepers have had finger injuries). This kind of analysis can be very significant for revealing risk factors of suffering an injury and introducing various preventive actions in the training process in order to reduce both the number of injuries in training and non-contact injuries.
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