In 2013, an Ohio Bobcat took charge of the University of Akron women’s swimming and diving team.
Given the results since, no one will begrudge him the affiliation with one of UA’s fiercest rivals.
Brian Peresie, a 2000 graduate of OU, won the Mid-American Conference championship in his first year with the Zips. He’s now run that to three consecutive titles with UA’s triumph at the conference meet Feb. 24-27 at Bowling Green.
Peresie arrived at UA from Malone University, where he served as head coach of the re-formed swim and diving team. Prior to that, he coached as an assistant for the Bobcats. He also swam for his alma mater as a student-athlete.
Those experiences led to his hiring at UA, but to expect such success immediately might have been too much to ask. Coaches like to talk about culture, and it’s not uncommon for coaches to state the cupboard was bare when they arrived.
Not Peresie.
“The talent was definitely here that first year,” he said during a recent interview. “It was really just about getting them to follow a black line, up and down the pool and finding different ways to get them engaged. The more excited I was, the bigger vision [I had] for the program, they grabbed a hold of it.”
However, that required effort. Yes, the dreaded, cliched “culture change” was involved. Changing culture in some sports is easy to explain — it’s a matter of attitude.
Peresie said it works the same in swimming and diving. You make eye contact with opponents, you engage them at a minimal level verbally and, until it works, as Peresie said his mother told him, sometimes you have to fake it until you make it.
“The best swimmers, how do they walk on the pool deck? That’s how we have to walk on the pool deck,” Peresie told his athletes. “Literally teaching them how to interact during a competition. It’s not basketball. It’s not football. You’re not banging heads with people. You’re not bumping into them. You’re walking by them on the pool deck.”
And, yes, that’s something the team as a whole practices. It may sound goofy and he confesses to that, but there’s no arguing with results. Three consecutive banners are nothing at which to turn up a nose.
Peresie said recruiting and making current athletes on the roster better will feed the program. Sustainability is the key.
“That’s kind of snowballed where our freshman class this year made a tremendous impact in our third championship,” he said.
Those freshmen include Sadie Fazekas and Madison Myers, who qualified for the NCAA Championships as members of UA’s 200 medley relay team along with seniors Hannah Raspopovich and Ashley Niznik. Junior Luka Szynal, a two-time MAC champion in 2016 who will swim the 200 backstroke, joins them.
They are the first women’s swimmers to represent UA at the NCAAs.
That Myers also is a highly touted swimmer coming out of Copley High School only helps other prominent swimmers in the region and state see that UA has a program that has arrived.
“We’ve gotten looks from a lot of other swimmers in the area that might not have considered us in the past,” Peresie said. “I think you can definitely build a very, very strong program, even nationally, with just swimmers from Ohio and a lot of swimmers that are in this area — and divers, too, for that matter.”
George M. Thomas can be reached at gmthomas@thebeaconjournal.com. Read the Zips blog at www.ohio.com/zips. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/GeorgeThomasABJ.