Frank Busch's named popped up on my cell phone Tuesday at 1:12 p.m.
"I'm standing a few feet from Caitlin Leverenz at the medal ceremony," said USA Swimming's national team director. "She has a bronze medal hanging around her neck. Do you realize how far she had to come to get here?"
This is how far: In September of 2002, 11-year-old Caitlin Leverenz entered her first swimming event of national significance, the La Jolla Rough Water Swim off the coast of San Diego. She swam 250 yards, finishing third in the girls' 11 category.
Busch handed his phone to Leverenz's college coach, Cal's Teri McKeever, who is the head coach of the U.S. women's Olympic swimming team. It was McKeever who flew into Tucson in the summer of 2008 and successfully recruited Leverenz. At the time, McKeever said Leverenz was possibly the top recruit in the nation.
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Now, four years later, it's clear Teri McKeever knows her business.
"I don't know if I'm going to make much sense because I'm so happy for Caitlin, just overjoyed," McKeever said. "You should see her smiling. She put so much work into this."
Leverenz's work began in 1998, when she was 7. She joined the El Dorado Aquatics Club, not the more prominent Ford Aquatics program and its stable of elite swimmers operated by Busch and his UA assistants. The EDAC was operated on a shoestring; it had to "rent water" at the Forty Niner Country Club, and for part of each year the only time available for rent, and swim, was 5 a.m.
"We'd just get up at 4 or 4:30 and deal with it," her mother, Jeannine Leverenz, told me.
Leverenz was unwavering in her desire to become an elite swimmer. She once joked that the commitment to being a winning swimmer was so consuming she should wear a T-shirt that says "NOT TODAY," on the front and "I'VE GOT SWIMMING PRACTICE" on the back.
By 2004, when she was 13, she showed up on the state's radar for the first time. She entered the Lost Dutchman Classic in Phoenix and blew everyone out of the water by winning six events, breaking age-group records in three of them.
Although there was unspoken pressure for her to leave the modest El Dorado Aquatics Club and join Busch's galaxy of swimming stars at the Hillenbrand Aquatics Center, Leverenz was adamant that she would continue to work with her first coach, Franz Resseguie.
The swimming community thought she was daft (how's that for a timely British word?).
With Resseguie as her coach, Leverenz made the USA junior national team, swimming in Australia in 2005 and being regularly invited to the Olympic Training Center.
Early in the summer of 2006, after her freshman year at Sahuaro High School, Leverenz soared to No. 7 in the world rankings for the 200 IM. At the Speedo Grand Prix that summer she beat 2004 Olympians Dana Kirk and Kristin Caverly in that event. Both were college seniors.
By then, Busch and McKeever and all of the top college swimming coaches hoped to get Leverenz to swim for their team. Oddly, she didn't take a visit to the UA. I remember Busch saying, on several occasions, that no matter what he tried, it wasn't working.
"She's not going to be a Wildcat," he said. She would go to Cal, where her father, Chris, a geotechnical engineer, had attended school.
Not everything went well. At the 2008 Olympic trials, a month after graduating from Sahuaro, Leverenz failed to make the USA Olympic team by .85 of a second, losing to her former idol, Amanda Beard, in the 200 IM finals.
It was a career-type crucible for Leverenz. For the first time in her athletic life, she had not prevailed. Worse, with little notice, her coach, Resseguie, left town. He moved to Oregon to coach at a suburban Portland aquatics club.
"She struggled as a freshman," Cal's McKeever said. "The disappointment from the Olympic trials carried over. We had some tough times, but Caitlin responded, and here she is, with a bronze medal."
As a Cal junior this season, Leverenz was the NCAA's female swimmer of the year. She scored 57 points in the national finals, winning two events and helping the Bears win two relays, leading Cal to the NCAA championship.
Now, only 21, she has become one of just eight native Tucsonans to win a medal at the Summer Olympics. If she chooses to return in 2016, to Rio de Janeiro, Leverenz could match former Salpointe softball star Tairia Flowers as a two-time Olympic medalist.
In an interview session Tuesday at the Olympic Park Aquatics Center, Leverenz, whose nature is to be cheerful, went a step beyond.
"I was overjoyed with emotion when I turned around and saw that I had gotten third and was able to get on the medal stand for my country," she said. "It was an amazing feeling."
After all these years, she was on Busch's team and he on hers. Everybody went home happy.
From Tucson to the Podium
Tucson prep stars who have won a medal in the Olympic Games:
• Michael Bates, Amphitheater: 1992, track, 200 meters, bronze.
• Tairia Flowers, Salpointe Catholic: 2004, softball, gold, 2008, silver
• Colleen Lanne, Salpointe, 2004: swimming, 4x100 relay, silver
• Caitlin Leverenz, Sahuaro: 2012, swimming, 200 IM, bronze
• Doug Northway, Sahuaro: 1972, swimming, 400 freestyle, bronze
• Lacey Nymeyer, Mountain View: 2008, swimming, 4x100 relay, silver
• Anthony Sanders, Santa Rita: 2000, baseball, gold
• Kerry Strug, Green Fields: 1996, gymnastics, gold
Contact Greg Hansen at 573-4362 or ghansen@azstarnet.com
