After Brian Zimmerman won the 200-yard butterfly Feb. 5, he got out of the pool and sat down next to his head coach, Lou Walker.

‘How does it feel to win the last event that will ever be swum at this pool?’ Walker asked Zimmerman.

It was a simple question posed by a man who had spent 37 years of his life swimming and coaching at Syracuse, directed at a swimmer who had competed in the near-century-old program’s final four years of existence.

For the SU men and women’s swimming and diving team, the program’s end is something they’ve watched creeping up over the horizon for four years now. They saw their roster dwindle from 32 to 15, seniors graduate and swimmers transfer or quit. Still, they say it hasn’t affected their day-to-day goals or those of their long-time coach.

‘It’s not about the last meet,’ Walker said. ‘The kids come in, and they’re looking forward to today and tomorrow. No one’s sitting around thinking, ‘Oh, this is the last Tuesday.’ That’s not the way it is. You have a meet schedule and a plan to approach, and you do it.’

The end of the 2010-11 season marks the 101st and final season for men’s swimming. The women’s program has competed at the NCAA level since the 1976-77 season.

The program got the axe June 1, 2007, when Athletic Director Daryl Gross announced Syracuse would cut the men’s and women’s swimming and diving teams and add a women’s hockey program beginning in the 2008-09 season.

Gross pointed to the outdated facility and the financial difficulties of building a new one as reasons for the cut.

‘If we are going to have a swimming program here, then it’s very important that we have the resources to do it the right way,’ Gross said in an article published in The Daily Orange on June 1, 2007. ‘Part of those resources would be getting a new natatorium, a new pool facility, diving and all those type of things. The cost for those is enormous, and they’re costs that we can’t put into it right now.’

Early talks of eliminating the program started around 2003, said former SU Athletic Director Jake Crouthamel.

‘The facility was deteriorating or had already deteriorated, and we were running short on cash,’ Crouthamel said. Title IX, he said, was also a part of the move. ‘It was 60-40, leaning toward the financial side,’ he said.

Gross maintains that the reason was purely economical and did not stem from Title IX compliance, which makes discrimination illegal on the basis of sex at universities. But the byproduct of the move did enhance gender equality, as it resulted in a women’s team.

The end of an era

On a summer morning four years ago, Ryan Corcoran awoke to find a Facebook message with a link to a Syracuse Post-Standard article. The article announced the elimination of the SU swim team. Corcoran, an incoming sophomore scholarship swimmer, said the news came out of nowhere.

‘I read it in the newspaper before the athletic department attempted to contact us,’ Corcoran said. ‘It was just awful.’

Natalie Mazzetta, a soon-to-be freshman, heard the news from her club coach at practice. Mazzetta had signed on to swim with Syracuse in the fall and now realized she’d have just one year to compete once she got to school. It was too late to look into applying to other universities and past scholarship-signing deadlines.

‘I just went home and burst into tears,’ she said. ‘It was devastating. I felt cheated.’

Once the school year started, Corcoran and his teammates launched a campaign to save their team. They made T-shirts and ‘Save Swimming’ signs and stood in the upper levels at SU football games. They traveled to the U.S. Short Course Nationals in Atlanta, Ga., where famous swimmers, such as Olympic gold medalist Ryan Lochte, signed letters of support. Their cybernetwork stretched to six-time Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps and two-time champion Natalie Coughlin, both of whom signed an online petition.

‘We did a really good job of making a ruckus,’ Corcoran said. ‘The support we got was amazing.’

Guy Edson swam with Walker and graduated from Syracuse in 1973. He’s now the technical director of the American Swimming Coaches Association, an organization that has provided resources and counsel to every Olympic coach since 1956, as well as to coaches at the collegiate and high school levels.

John Leonard, executive director of the ASCA, joked the two are part of a ‘Syracuse swimming mafia,’ a group of highly influential SU alumni on the national swimming scene.

Both sent letters to SU Chancellor Nancy Cantor offering advice on what the team could do to stay afloat and asking for answers to pressing questions. They never received a response.

‘In my opinion, they made a poorly informed decision and didn’t want to hear from their own alumni and community folks about why those decisions were wrong,’ Leonard said.

Among their concerns: The price tag Gross quoted for the new facility, $35 million, was ‘way too high,’ Leonard said. And basing a team’s competitiveness on the newness of its swimming pool is not a fair gauge, Corcoran and other swimmers said.

‘When you look at the people who have come out of Syracuse swimming or who have had some connection with it and where they are in the world of swimming today, it’s incredible,’ Edson said. ‘To cut that off is really to cut off a portion of the base of the pyramid that feeds the peak.’

Swimming, Edson said, is often on the chopping block because it’s an infrequent revenue generator. ‘But when you eliminate that opportunity, you eliminate the future and who could come out of it.’

A temporary pass

In January 2008, six months after Gross announced the cut, the team won a small victory — a three-year extension in a ‘phase-out’ program. Scholarship swimmers had the option to stay and swim through 2011, transfer to another school or stop swimming and keep their scholarship.

Most stayed to swim during the 2008-09 school year. But between the second- and third-to-last year, scholarship swimmers dropped from 17 to four — seven quit, six graduated — creating a shift in competition and morale.

Then-sophomore Glenn Kalata watched the bulk of seniors leave and knew he had a difficult decision to make. ‘I was bummed. I didn’t want to have to make a change halfway through my college experience, but they weren’t recruiting anymore,’ he said. ‘I realized I couldn’t swim competitively at Syracuse.’

Kalata transferred to Florida State University, where he swam for his last two years of eligibility. ‘It was the right move,’ he said. ‘I’m happy I’m here, and now it seems like it never happened, but at the time it was tough to do.

Mazzetta was one of the seven who quit in 2009 but stayed at Syracuse. ‘A lot of things went into my decision, but ultimately I just had to do what was going to be best for me,’ she said.

‘There were definitely days, especially after the decision I made not to continue, when I looked back,’ she added. ‘I’d have days like that, and I still have days like that. But it’s not positive to dwell on past decisions.

‘It was extremely unfair of the athletic department, and in my opinion it was one of their poorest decisions.’

As numbers dropped, the fight to keep the team did, too.

‘After we had that first victory, it was great,’ Corcoran said. ‘But it’s like anything. The excitement fades over time, and by now there’s only two scholarship athletes, and no one’s making a stink about the team going away.’

Kuba Kotynia is one of two scholarship swimmers who stayed with the team to the end. Kotynia is ranked sixth in the nation in the 200-yard breaststroke and is competing this week in the Big East championships in Louisville, Ky. He also qualifies to compete in the NCAA championships in March, although he hasn’t been chosen to compete yet. Kotynia’s decision to stay stands in contrast to many of his teammates who left. His commitment is one that has inspired his fellow swimmers these past few years.

‘It was complicated. There were other teams who recruited me, but I stayed here for the coaching, and I’m glad I did,’ Kotynia said. ‘No regrets.’

One person who never thought of leaving was Walker. Captain of the SU swim team for two years, Walker represented the university at the NCAA championships and set seven school records during his time at SU. He became head coach of the women’s team in 1976 and the men’s in 1979. Walker met his wife and now-assistant coach Ellie here, and the two have raised their three children in Syracuse.

‘You put a plan in place. Our goal was to see these kids through this process, and we’re proud of the job we’ve done,’ Walker said. ‘From the very beginning, the focus was on the kids and making sure they have that opportunity and to provide it to the best of my ability.’

His swimmers, past and present, praise his character of strength and sanguinity throughout the whole ordeal. Walker said he’ll look for other collegiate swimming coaching jobs, but leaving Syracuse will be tough.

‘Can you wallow in self-pity, and can you get angry and depressed? Sure you could,’ Walker said. ‘I like to think I made a conscious decision not to go that way.’

A different kind of team

Though the size of the team and the number of Division I-level athletes diminished, the ‘phase out’ left room for more walk-ons in the program’s final four years. That meant more time to focus on personal bests and an added opportunity for students who never would have had the chance to train with a seasoned coach in Walker.

This year’s team of 15 comprises 13 walk-ons and two scholarship swimmers. For Katie Lewinski, a senior who walked on her freshman year, the smaller program gave her the push she needed. It also created an unmatched camaraderie among those who stayed.

‘There’s a definite sense of accomplishment and honor for the four seniors left that out of something like 12 freshmen who started, we stayed through it all,’ Lewinski said.

Lewinski qualified for the Big East championships her sophomore year in the 50-yard freestyle. Walker coached her to try and make it again her senior year with a kind of attention she doesn’t think she would have gotten on a team of 40 or 50 swimmers.

For the four freshmen who saw their careers through, the ending is bittersweet. For Walker, it’s the curtain call to the program into which he’s poured more than half his life.

‘I’ve come out a winner,’ Lewinski said. ‘If this hadn’t happened I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to swim. What sucks is what’s happening to Lou and Ellie. We’re saying goodbye to four years, but he’s saying goodbye to 39.’

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Published on February 16, 2011 at 12:00 pm