[Breeze]

Brett Update

At the very beginning of the season Brett was handed a questionnaire packet to help him establish his goals, and at the end of the week it was time to go over those. Brett, the wife, and I all sat with Coach Todd to go over what he had written. At the time he was filling out his goals, I felt he was taking the process way to lightly, and the coach basically let him know, in a nice way, that he needs to be more serious about what he hopes to accomplish, and he’ll expect a much different packet next year when we do this again.

In addition to setting goals here are some things that came out of the meeting…

- Attendance is good so far
- Because he is young and small he needs to be patient with results
- Need to eat well and get plenty of sleep
- Work on ankle flexibility
- Need to really focus on flutter kicks in practice

Brett was also asked to look through collegeswimming.com to find 15 schools he might be interested in swimming for when he graduates high school. There were several reasons for this: first, the coach wants Brett to get familiar with the process, understand how to find schools for when he gets older and closer to graduation. Second, he wants Brett to look for schools that offer his field of study (right now he wants to be an engineer) or something he can use to get into his field of study. Third, and this is probably the biggest reason, he wants Brett to look at the times of swimmers on the team, so he’ll know what times he’ll need to reach in order to swim for those schools. Coach Todd said he’d work with Brett next year to create his swim profile for recruiting and he told me to get him an account with the NCAA Clearinghouse next year as well.

This of course got me thinking. Up until now, I figured Brett, like most people, would end up finishing their competitive careers when they graduate high school. I thought Brett would be a good high school swimmer, earn a couple varsity letters, and then graduate, I didn’t expect he would be anywhere close to the caliber necessary to be a college swimmer. However, after researching different schools on Collegeswimming.com, there are a few schools that have Breaststrokers that are only a couple seconds faster than Brett right now. Given that Brett is still just barely over 100 lbs. and has a decent amount of growing still to do, I expect, if he keeps working hard, he might actually get into the time range where some teams might be interested. Clearly the odds are long on him developing into a swimmer that Auburn, Cal, Stanford, Michigan, or Texas would look at, but if he could swim at college at all (assuming he’ll still want to) that would be great. In fact, honestly right now, I feel that Brett would do much better in a small school environment for college. The only problem is that many of the schools Brett would be interested in, and/or capable of swimming for are terribly expensive and swimming is almost never a full ride scholarship, and many small schools are Div III which don’t offer any scholarships at all. But we’ll cross that bridge when/if the time comes.

As far as schools go, I have very little to offer Brett in terms of schools to look into. When I was looking into schools, way, way back some of the schools I was accepted to that I thought might be good for Brett included:

Furman – no swim team
Tulane – no men’s team
Coastal Carolina – no swim team
Atlantic Christian – no swim team
Maryville College – no swim team

Also, I’m not well traveled, so I don’t know much about schools outside of the Southeast…If he continues to improve, we may have to make some road trips (if we can find time in his ridiculously busy schedule). If you have any suggestions of a school you’re familiar with that you think we should check out let me know.