To the extreme
At another school, Lee Nelson and Marshel Renz would be sporting letter jackets and vying for state championships.
But at University High School, the pair toil in relative anonymity.
Nelson, a junior, and Renz, a senior, are swimmers. Two of the best in the country, as a matter of fact.
Renz currently is ranked No. 2 in the nation among 17- and 18-year olds in USA Swimming’s IM Xtreme Challenge – a new motivational program that ranks swimmers by their performance in five or six specific events: the 200- and 400-meter individual medley, the 400/500 free, 200 back, 200 breast and 200 fly. Nelson currently is ranked in the top 25.
“You get a certain amount of points based on how fast you swim in five of those events,” Renz explained. “Based on those points, I’m No. 2 in the nation. The guy that’s No. 1 is really fast.”
The program was designed to promote versatility in age-group swimming – adding an incentive to swimmers to swim each of the sports strokes. To qualify for the Xtreme Challenge national rankings, a swimmer must swim at least one of the individual medleys.
Both Renz and Nelson consider the IM a specialty, although Nelson considers himself more of a distance swimmer.
“I’m mostly a mid-distance and distance swimmer,” Nelson said. “I swim the same events as Marshel. But my best events are the 400 IM, which is known as the toughest race, and 500 and 1,000 free. My shortest event is the 200 free – I think of that as a sprint.”
The pair are part of the Spokane Area Swim team, which practices mornings at the Spokane Valley YMCA and afternoons at Shadle Park Pool.
In an area that does not offer interscholastic swimming, both Renz and Nelson found the sport early.
“I started when I was 121/2,” Renz said. “I started off doing soccer and I wasn’t very good at it. I tried baseball and basketball and nothing really stuck. When I was in sixth grade, there was this girl who was a swimmer. I asked her who she swam for and she told me and, after a while, I talked my mom into letting me try out.”
Nelson started swimming while his family lived in Twisp, Wash.
“I started year-round swimming when I was 13 or 14,” he said. “I did summer swimming when I was little. Then I met a swim coach from the University of Washington and he told me that I had more of a gift for swimming than the other kids and I decided to go with it. We moved to Spokane and I joined the Spokane Area Swim team.”
Both figure the sport will carry them through college. Renz already has taken several campus visits and will decide which school to accept a scholarship from in the next month or so. Nelson figures to follow a similar timetable next year.
Not having a school swim team to compete for is a handicap when it comes to catching the eye of college recruiters.
“I sometimes think about that,” Nelson said. “I have a lot of friends over in Seattle and in Walla Walla and they’re all into high school swimming. There are a lot of college recruiters there for the big state meets. We don’t get that kind of a chance very often – maybe once or twice a year.”
You learn how to take advantage of those opportunities when they come along, Renz added.
“I think I swim better in those big meets because I know those chances don’t come along very often,” he said. “I like the pressure of swimming in a big meet.”
University High has helped spread the word of its competitive swimmers – keeping them from toiling completely in the dark.
“My friends know what I do, and that helps,” Renz said. “But it’s not like other sports.”
It would help if people knew just how challenging the sports is.
“I just wish more people knew just how tough a sport swimming really is,” Nelson said. “I have people come up to me and say ‘Swimming? That’s not a sport at all.’ I think to myself ‘You have no idea!’ ” The three toughest sports are supposed to be wrestling, swimming and gymnastics … the toughest sports out there.”