ACADEMIC swimming inNOTES Slovenia because specializing on skiing would have meant missing upwards of 100 days of school a year, he broke the knuckle in his thumb doing a trick skiing off a jump in December of his second year in college. Limited in the pool during a six-week recuperation, Zupan wrapped a plastic bag around his cast and did what he could do. Unable to train long distance he turned to a bodyboard to maintain his cardio fitness and work on his breaststroke kick. When he finally returned to competition the Dartmouth coaches made a fateful decision. “He hadn’t been able to really train, so we decided to try him in his second-best stroke, which was the breaststroke,” Wilson said. “We had already started using him on the medley relay in the breaststroke, but we had still been concentrating on distances sophomore year. After he broke his thumb, we said, ‘You’re not going to get the training in (for the Ivy League Championships), so let’s cut these distances down to something more manageable,’ and he worked extremely hard at it. Whenever he’s in the pool he is not going to lose to anyone.” Zupan made the decision look good when he set a school record in the 200 breast at the Ivy League Championships. He also won the 400 IM and finished fourth in the 200 IM, with yet another school record. Still, it was the 200 breast time that was the real eye-opener. “All of a sudden his breaststroke took off and he became an internationally strong breaststroker,” Wilson marveled. “That’s
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unusual. It was a freak of nature but I would like to think that if I’m not smart enough to see it, hopefully one of my assistants would have been smart enough to see his breaststroke potential.” Ironically, it was another injury a few years earlier that had given Zupan the breaststroke fundamentals he would refine when he missed time in college. “In my sophomore year of high school I was injured and my coach taught me proper technique, so I knew how to swim it,” he said. “But I always thought I was more of a distance freestyler, so I would focus on those events. My freshman year, if someone had told me I was going to be a breaststroker, I would have laughed.” But that’s exactly what Slovenia’s preeminent long distance swimmer was becoming. At the European Championships in France last November he shattered the Slovenian 200 breaststroke record by five seconds, finishing third behind a Russian and a Ukranian. By extending the taper he did for the European Championships less than a week later he set a school record of 1:53.87 at the Brown Invitational, the best time ever by an Ivy League swimmer and fast enough to win a spot in the NCAA Championships in Indianapolis in March. But having tapered for the Ivy League Championships in early March, he was somewhat apprehensive heading to the NCAA’s a full three weeks later. Finishing 42nd in the 200 IM on the opening day of the competition in Indy did nothing to allay his worries. “Without proper training you sort of start losing the strength 16
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and endurance that you previously had,” he explained. “My first event was much worse than my personal best, so there was concern that I would do really badly in the breaststroke as well.” There was good news and bad news on the second day. Although he was disqualified from the 100 breast for an illegal kick at the start, if his time had held up it would have been school record and close to advancing to the finals. Bolstered by that strong swim, he returned to the pool for the 200 breast on the final day of the Championships and broke his own school record with a 1:53.29, the third-fastest time in the prelims. A solid 1:54.40 in the finals brought him eighth place, the best finish by a Dartmouth swimmer at Nationals since Terry Robinson ’69 was sixth in the 200 free in 1968. “I was positively surprised at the end,” Zupan said. “It’s hard coming from the Ivy Championships, where I was in great shape and felt great in the water, to feeling much worse in the water. But I was really happy that I mentally prepared myself for that race and managed to pull off the final.” He’s determined to return to NCAAs and do even better this March, but that’s only one of his goals in his final season. Chosen a captain by his teammates, he’s eager for the Big Green to continue the ascent up the Ivy League standings that began when his class arrived on campus. “When Necj came in our team was the dregs,” Wilson said, not mincing words. “That’s probably the best way to put it. We always worked our tails off and the kids did very well. But you can’t win the race without the horses, and we did not have the horses. “Since Necj’s class came in, both the men and women have things turned around. We were a solid fifth with both teams last year. We are trying to catch Yale, which was fourth in the Ivy League. We are not ready for Harvard and Princeton yet, but we’re trying. Necj and a couple of others in the ’14 class changed the attitude of the program from a team that would go to meets and do the best that we could, to a team that could beat almost anybody in the league.” Zupan plans to stay in the United States for a while after graduation to work in finance or economics. He’s got his eyes on possibly swimming in the Rio Olympics, but his immediate focus is much closer to his adopted home. “We are shooting for top four in the Ivy League this year,” he said, echoing his coach. “That’s a huge leap in the Ivies because you need every single person do their best to score points in every single event. “The fact that we have been able to build a squad that can actually be competitive with the best teams in the Ivy League I think is pretty remarkable, but we aren’t going to stay still.” Nor is Zupan, a true student-athlete committed to succeeding in the pool and out of it. “I would feel I am wasting this huge opportunity I have been given as a student at Dartmouth and as a member of this team if I wasn’t doing my best in both to get the best out of it,” he said. “Classes and swimming is hard, The Athletic Sponsors but if you like doing it, if you like your funded a total of 14 major and you like learning, that’s recruiting trips from 5 basically what the point of college different countries by is. It’s not as hard as long as you are international recruits passionate about it.” in 2012-13. Spoken like a true Zupa-man.