How different was Fallbrook from our previous home in New Bern, North Carolina?
As spring approached, I saw the differences spelled out first hand on the front page of our local newspaper’s sports section. The local high school beat writer ran a full half-page preview of the coming high school swim season, with a note about each of Fallbrook’s returning stars. The last column started with the sentence, “Perhaps the fastest Warrior on this year’s team is freshman Dan Head…”
They were actually hyping my season, and it was insane.
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| I wore my letter jacket every day as a freshman. |
I fell in love with high school swimming. A lot of year-round swimmers hated it because it tended to interfere with training with your “real”, year-round team, but that never mattered to me. Having spent the majority of my life as a New Kid, the experience of suddenly finding myself a star high school athlete was worth any amount of hassle. Swimming brought status, acceptance, and even friendships that a New Kids like me couldn’t possibly have accessed otherwise. It meant that people knew me. Against the crushing loneliness that a military brat’s life often produced, I had exactly three things—the love and support of my parents, enough swagger to walk into a room like I owned the place, and enough hard-won talent in the pool to make people sit up and pay attention.
In many ways, swimming for Fallbrook was like returning to the NVSL. We swam a weekly dual-meet schedule against other local schools that included a litany of quick hitting events. A 200 yard medley relay opened each meet, followed by 100 yard competitions for each stroke, a 200 individual medley, a 50 freestyle, 100 freestyle, and 500 freestyle, and a 400 yard freestyle relay to close. As I had in Washington, I swam butterfly on the medley relay, led the 100 Fly, and typically either led or anchored the freestyle relay, depending on how many sprinters our team could field.
San Diego swimming was unique in that the high schools had both JV and Varsity swimming squads, but then swimming was a part of the lifeblood out there. It was a core component of the region’s unique sports identity. This was not to say that all of the high school kids swam year-round. Most didn’t. But even the seasonal swimmers tended to have what I’d have considered real talent back in North Carolina. The kids had all grown up swimming as a basic part of life.
My friend Danny G__ was a typical, if high-end, example of what many kids did at the high school level. Danny was first and foremost a surfer, secondly a water polo player, and only slightly a competitive swimmer. Even then, I think Danny only swam because what else was he going to do with his time? Regardless, Danny had a perennial beach tan and gloriously long sun-streaked brown hair, and he talked the surfer’s talk like he was born to it. He was also the best water polo player I’d ever seen. As a sophomore on the varsity squad during my freshman campaign, Danny occasionally set the two-meter position—essentially playing center-forward against kids as much as two years older—and absolutely owned kids even twice his size. He had the same God-given athletic grace and power in the water that my father possessed out of it, and this gave him decent speed, incredible ball skills, and a wicked backhand skip-shot that belonged in the Olympics.
Girls loved Danny. Hanging out with him was like walking in Apollo’s shadow. It would have been damned aggravating had he not been such an incredibly nice guy. The captain of the JV girls cheerleading team fell madly in love with Danny during my sophomore year, and let me tell you, she was the kind of drop-dead bleach blond knockout that men go to war over. But Danny refused to sleep with her—or even to date her seriously.
“But why not?” one of our friends asked one day after water polo practice.
Danny shrugged. “Because she’d let me, man, and then where would we be?”
This confused a lot of the guys, but I got it immediately. Danny had this Zen surfer ethos that simply would not allow him to intentionally harm another human being. He wasn’t in love with that girl, and he didn’t want to hurt her. Which was exactly why people loved him, myself included.
Danny was also a talented swimmer. He wasn’t nearly on the same level with me or my friend Matt in terms of pure speed or work ethic, but like a lot of the better water polo players, he could put together a decent 50 or 100 freestyle, and in a pinch, he might even give you a 200 that would score legitimate points at a dual-meet. There were a lot of guys like that at Fallbrook, and depending on how many we could field, one might occasionally bump me out of the anchor leg on the freestyle relay—and maybe out of the leadoff spot as well.
That didn’t bother me. Swimming was an individual sport, but my team was still a team. My primary role was to win the butterfly and to put my medley relay into position to win with a dominant performance during the butterfly leg of the relay. If I contributed in other ways, those were bonus points. I was never the most versatile swimmer, but what I did, I did very well. That was enough to make me an indispensable part of the team as a whole.
By the time we got into our dual-meet schedule, I was routinely putting down :58s in the 100 Butterfly. I could put that down on a Tuesday after Geometry class, and if the other team had a decent butterflier, well, I had another gear, too. I don’t think I ever lost a dual-meet race in my best event, as a freshman or otherwise. As a New Kid at a new school, this was exactly what I needed. But :58 wasn’t blow-me-out-of-the-water fast, even for a high school dual-meet. Not in San Diego. It was fast enough to win races, but it wasn’t the kind of performance that made parents leap to their feet open-mouthed, shouting, “Holy shit! What did I just see?”
But I was improving. I eventually got down to :57, and as the CIF Championship meet approached, :56.
I was on the cusp, I could feel it.
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