Looking for a peak performance

It is commonly known that professional football players annually migrate to the University of Miami during the offseason to train among the sport’s best athletes.
For the past few weeks, a similar practice has been in place at the University of Virginia’s Aquatic and Fitness Center.
Scores of swimmers with ties to the Virginia men’s and women’s programs have trained countless hours for one common goal: excelling at the U.S. Olympic Trials, an eight-day event that gets underway today in Omaha, Neb.
In all, Virginia is sending 35 swimmers with ties to the program, a figure that includes three alums and seven future Cavaliers.
Last week, the magnitude and multitude of what Virginia has accomplished with its eye-catching qualifying efforts finally hit Pat Mellors.
“I was just thinking after practice the other day about it and I couldn’t even imagine how many people we have going,” said Mellors, who redshirted this season to focus on the trials. “The sheer numbers … I don’t even know how many there.
“It is really unbelievable. You can’t imagine that there are like 40 kids that are going to be at this meet from our team.”
At least one swimmer headed to the sport’s biggest national stage looked at it in a slightly different light.
“I think once you are a Cavalier and you know what the team is all about and you know what your brothers and sisters do with every day, any time something good happens, you are not surprised,” said Matt McLean, the 2008 ACC swimmer and freshman of the year.
“Virginia swimming puts in a lot of work and gets a lot of results, and we are all really proud of that. We are glad to have each other as teammates.”
In order to qualify for the Olympics individually, the swimmers from coach Mark Bernardino’s nationally acclaimed squad must finish in the top two spots in the finals.
That is a daunting task for what many think will be the fastest meet in the world this year.
“It has been said pretty commonly that the United States Olympic Trials are going to be faster than the Olympic games,” McLean said. “It is unbelievable.”
The national coach for the U.S., Mark Schubert, told reporters that “a number of events will be so hotly contested that there’s a possibility that third place would be on the medal stand in Beijing, so that’s going to provide a lot of drama.”
Mellors said he even read where Schubert commented that it would take a world record time to qualify.
“I think his statement is a little extreme,” Mellors added, “but I agree that there is very little margin for error unless you are one or two swimmers, both male and female combined.”
Many of the swimmers with ties to UVa will compete in multiple events, including McLean, but attempting to hold energy back for later events is not an option.
“You have to give every event 100 percent,” McLean said. “There’s no room for mistakes at a meet like this. In my first NCAAs, the best advice that Mark told me was, ‘you have to be ready to go in the morning in prelims.’
“I was ready to go and I went into finals seeded eighth and I came out fourth. I credit that to Mark and my team.”
To an outsider it would appear that failing to reach the Olympic games would devastate swimmers that circled the trial dates on their calendars years ago and worked for that accomplishment.
With a packed schedule each year, swimmers do not base their careers in a 364-days-until-hockey-tryouts-type fashion like Happy Gilmore.
“Ultimately, this is very, very important, but four years ago I wasn’t saying, ‘I am three years and 150 days out from the Olympics,’” Mellors said. “I was trying to get ready for World University Games or Senior Nationals. It’s kind of like a stepping-stone process and you are not really looking forward solely to [the trials] itself.
“I don’t think you can really treat it like that because I have done a lot of other stuff over the past four years that I am really proud of.”