Arizona swimming team broke through in 2008 to sweep NCAA titles

Stanford and USC owned West Coast swimming forever. If you wanted to take a shot at the Cardinal and Trojans, it would be like a basketball coach at a lower-tier Atlantic Coast Conference school taking on Duke and North Carolina.

When Arizona hired Frank Busch from Cincinnati in 1989, the UA’s swimming program was in chaos. The previous coach had been fired in midseason for off-field improprieties; the Wildcat swimming program hit bottom.

Over the next 22 years, Busch had a run to rival any coach in Arizona history, including Lute Olson and Mike Candrea.

The Wildcats won 49 NCAA individual championships and 31 NCAA relay titles.

Busch was named the NCAA Coach of the Year six times, and the Pac-10 Coach of the Year 11 times.

Those figures are not typos.

A few days before the 2008 NCAA championships, Busch told me it was time the Wildcats broke through and won it all.

“We’ve been so close for so many years,” he said. “I really believe this is our time.”

In astonishing eight-day span, Arizona won the NCAA women’s national title and the NCAA men’s championship. It won the women’s title first, in Columbus, Ohio, routing the nation’s No. 1 swimming school, Auburn, 494 to 348.

“It was probably the meet of a lifetime,” UA assistant coach Augie Busch, Frank’s son, now the head coach at Virginia, said at a welcome-home celebration. “We seemed to have all of the big horses. And now we are going for the sweep.”

The following weekend in Seattle, Arizona scored a whopping 500½ points to whip Texas (406) and Stanford (344)

“This is big time,” said assistant coach Rick DeMont, himself a former world record holder who is now Arizona’s head coach. “You don’t get a lot of big times in life, and this is one of the big times.”

How did this happen?

Arizona recruited as well or better than any swimming program in America for two decades.

Busch coached the UA women’s team to No. 2 finishes at the NCAA in 1998, 2006 and 2007. His rosters were a roll-call of Olympic medalists, from Amanda Beard and Beth Botsford to Crissy Perham and Ashley Tappin.

It was the same on the men’s side. Busch signed nine-time NCAA champion Ryk Neethling from South Africa, which triggered a run of Olympians that included England’s Simon Burnett, Venezuela’s Albert Subirats and South African gold medalists Darian Townsend and Roland Schoeman.

The ’08 women’s national champions, however, were built around Marana Mountain View’s Lacey Nymeyer, who scored an incredible 210 points at the finals, winning the 100 freestyle herself and keying four championship relay teams.

All-Americans Annie Chandler, Ana Agy, Justine Schluntz and Lara Jackson piled up points.

“I’m so happy for my coaches,” Busch said. “We’ve been together for a long time. We’ve dreamed of this. We’ve talked of this. We’ve wondered how you do it.”

Winning the men’s title a week later was not surprising. Arizona built its men’s program on national champions Chad Carvin, Seth and Martin Pepper.

In ’08, Subirats, Townsend and All-Americans Cory Chitwood, Marcus Titus of Flowing Wells High School, Canada’s Joel Greenshields and Brazil’s Nicolas Nilo were dominating.

“A title has been a different language to them,” Busch said. “Now they get it. They want ed it. They had the idea that there’s an opportunity to make history for this program, and all the guys are part of it.”

Where are they now: Busch, 65, left Tucson in 2011 to accept a position as National Team Director for USA Swimming. He was elected to the American Swimming Coaches Hall of Fame 10 years ago.

How he did it: “I didn’t need to give them a Knute Rockne speech,” said Busch. “I just told them exactly the things they need to focus on, and as long as they engage in it, this is what happens.

“You realize it’s not magic. It just takes persistence and getting enough people on the same page at the same time. It came together this week just like it did last week. It’s almost surreal.”