Program Building
February 24, 2005 04:35 PM | General
February 24, 2005
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Matt Drozd knew the minute he began talking to Sergio Lopez that his life was about to change.
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| First-year coach Sergio Lopez already has his swimmers thinking big.
All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks photo |
Lopez, then associate head coach at Northwestern, was interviewing last spring for the West Virginia University swimming job when Drozd first met him. Drozd was one of handful of swimmers asked by the Athletic Department to take part in the interview process.
Lopez blew Drozd and the others away with his enthusiasm and passion for the sport.
“He was the one (among the candidates) who stood out by far,” Drozd recalled. “He seriously opened all of our eyes and made us want to swim again. Right then and there I knew he was the coach for us and I knew he could turn this program around into being one of the top programs in the country.”
It was an epiphany for Drozd, a Ross Township, Pa., resident who admits he almost transferred after his junior season saying it was one of the most miserable years of his life.
The spiral downward for Drozd began during the summer prior to his junior year when former coach Eric Mcllquham called the team to tell them he was taking the head coaching job at Alabama. Mcllquham had built a respectable men’s and women’s program, frequently finishing in the middle of the Big East pack.
He also developed the school’s first NCAA qualifier (Kleyton Franca in 2002) in 14 years and there was a feeling among those inside the WVU Natatorium that things were generally headed in the right direction.
Then when Mcllquham told the team he was leaving so late in the year, it proved to be a traumatic event for the team that, collectively, they weren’t able to overcome. “We had a lot of people on the team that were just so hurt by what had happened,” Drozd said.
Because it was so late in the summer and there wasn’t enough time before the school year to adequately put together a comprehensive search committee, the school opted to make assistant Steven Phillips interim head coach. Phillips, who has since landed an assistant coaching job at Clemson, was put in a very tough situation in the eyes of the team, according to Drozd.
“He was a fantastic guy and he went from being an assistant coach to being the enforcer,” he said. “He tried to go into that role but it was just too hard for him to do.”
Consequently West Virginia slipped to near the bottom of the Big East. It got to the point where many swimmers simply gave up.
“Last year our team was just falling apart,” Drozd said. “We had guys and girls walking out of practice and stuff like that. We had a lot of different groups and a lot of people hated each other on the team.”
By the time Big East championships rolled around Drozd said everyone just wanted the season to be over. “Last year my Big East was kind of like a funeral; that’s what it felt like,” he said. “A lot of us didn’t train and kind of gave up after that.”
Drozd, a sprinter, was one of just a handful of swimmers who kept on training through the summer. He remembers last spring being at Senior Nationals and an assistant coach from Auburn asking him if he had gotten out of that “hell-hole” there at West Virginia.
Drozd was floored. It was the first time it had really hit him just what others outside the program truly thought about West Virginia swimming.
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| Drozd |
“I was sitting there and it was like a slap in my face,” he said. “I was like, wow. I now knew the way people thought of West Virginia and its swim program.”
But Lopez, a bronze medalist in the 1988 Summer Olympic Games in Barcelona, was undaunted. He had researched West Virginia thoroughly and realized that the school did have the resources to make things work. He didn’t have to deal with the tremendously high academic standards that caused him to lose several first-rate swimmers at Northwestern, and the price of getting a good education at WVU was more than half that of his former employer. Plus, WVU offers a wide range of degree programs.
“There are a lot of plusses with West Virginia being in the Big East, football and basketball, and being in a college town,” he said. “I thought this was a place where I could build a dynasty.”
Lopez knew his name and West Virginia’s close proximity to Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., and Cleveland would make it possible for him to attract talented swimmers to come to Morgantown, W.Va. Therefore, his first goal was to repair the program and take care of the swimmers that were there right now.
“At the first meeting the only goal I gave them was to become a team,” Lopez said. “They had three coaches in the past three years. There was a lot of instability there. I don’t know what happened before but the past didn’t matter to me.”
Then Lopez dropped a bomb.
“I told them that based upon their best times, I wouldn’t have recruited most of you if I was still at Northwestern,” he said. “But I’m going to honor your scholarships and I’m going to work very hard to help you swim as fast as you can. And we’ll work with everyone the same way.”
That meant the sprinters worked with the distance swimmers and the butterflyers and the backstrokers were all together instead of training apart.
Lopez also noticed right away that almost the entire team had done nothing to stay in shape before the start of the season. Many of them had not even been in the pool since the Big East championships.
“When they came in the fall they were five months out of shape,” he said. “This is a year-round sport and you can’t compete if you don’t train that way.”
Lopez began with the mindset that he was probably going to have to clean house and get rid of the unwillingly. To his great surprise, nearly all of the 47 men and women’s swimmers he inherited were eager to learn and improve. He says that was one of the most gratifying things he encountered.
“They surprised me with how much desire they had to be good,” he said.
Lopez uses senior Mike Kristufek to illustrate his point. Kristufek came to WVU from Butler, Pa., and in three years in the Mountaineer program he had not come close to reaching his top times in the 200 butterfly he established as a high school senior.
“He had never made it to Big East and he hasn’t been in the best shape of his life the last three years,” Lopez said. “He was eight to nine seconds slower than his fastest time.”
Lopez told Kristufek that they were going to train for one meet and that was the meet he was going to make the cut to qualify for the conference championships.
“He kept doing 2:07, 2:08, 2:04 and his best was 2:02,” said Lopez. “He came here swimming a 1:57 and the cut for Big East was 1:56. We went to Connecticut and he took over the pool and made the Big East cut.
“Here you had a kid that nobody thought would make the Big East and he did it,” Lopez added.
There were other success stories. The Mountaineers won five combined Big East titles during the weekend, the men finishing fourth and the women placing seventh overall. The men’s finish equaled a school best set in 1997 and the women were four places better than last year’s 11th place finish.
West Virginia won the last three races of the meet and after its final victory the entire team, led by Lopez, raced up to the starter’s block and began singing ‘Country Roads’ to the amazement of the rest of the teams at the meet. It was an unforgettable moment for Lopez.
In five short months through a lot of hard work and sacrifice, the kids turned what that Auburn assistant referred to as a ‘hell-hole’ of a program into one beaming with self-pride, enthusiasm and achievement.
Lopez had accomplished his primary goal: he had built a team.
The man most pleased with Lopez’ success is the person who hired him: Director of Athletics Ed Pastilong, who admits that he still hops into the pool four to five times a week for exercise.
“When he sat down to talk to me it was clear that he wanted to carry on his competitiveness that he displayed as an athlete into coaching,” Pastilong said. “Then it became more apparent after we hired him. His resume was outstanding but his presence was even more impressive.”
“We had never won a (Big East) relay besides the year before I came here,” Drozd said. “We won the 400 free relay, the 200 medley relay and we should have won the 200 free relay but we messed that up.
“The first night we won the 200 medley relay everyone was in shock,” Drozd said. “All of the guys from other teams were coming up and were saying, ‘wow, that’s amazing.’”
Surprisingly, Drozd is one of several Mountaineers making the NCAA ‘B’ cuts meaning their times are good enough for consideration for the national championships. Lopez admits the two swimmers that are the closest to qualifying individually are freshmen Nick Delic in the 100 free and the 100 breast, and Pablo Marmolejo in the 200 fly.
Chris Hagedorn, a former Auburn transfer who hails from nearby Clarksburg, and women’s freshman Maritza Paredes also have a chance to qualify as well as the men’s 200 and 400 free relays, and the men’s 400 medley relay.
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| Lopez, an Olympic bronze medalist in 1988, getting his team prepared for this weekend's last chance meet at Purdue.
All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks photo |
Just simply being in the position of having this many swimmers so close to qualifying for nationals is remarkable considering the men have had just one qualifier in the last 17 years and the women have had only three since 1990 despite now being fully funded.
West Virginia established a total of 16 school records this year.
“The kids have seen the power that we can have,” Lopez said. “We can be one of the very best teams.”
There’s more. Perhaps the biggest moment so far for Lopez came during last November’s signing period when he was able to land his No. 1 swimming recruit over the likes of two-time national champion Auburn, Texas, Alabama and Northwestern. He comes from a small town in Illinois and he liked the thought of training with a former world champion swimmer and spending the next four years of his life in a safe, small college town.
“He was one of the top recruits in the country,” Lopez admitted. “Right after he came on his visit with his parents the following day he called Auburn and cancelled his visit.
“It was huge,” Lopez added. “The other kid that we signed is a very good breaststroker that Northwestern and a lot of schools like that would have signed. The more you develop kids the more people will want to come to your school.”
Drozd believes the West Virginia swimming program is a sleeping giant. “He’s coached for many great teams,” Drozd said of Lopez. “Kids know his name and he’s an Olympian. These kids are coming because they know he can take them to the next level.”
Drozd says the turnaround has taken place in both the men’s and women’s programs.
“There has been a dramatic change and I can see the women’s side getting much better by their recruiting,” he said. “This year we had the first girl (Paredes) that I’ve ever seen win a Big East title.”
Sadly, Drozd wishes he had another year or two to experience what great things lay ahead for the Mountaineers.
“I’m so proud that our team has turned around for the better and that he’s going to build this into a top 10 swimming program,” Drozd said. “I’m going to miss it a lot especially since we’ve got a great coach here now.”
