Coach Ziggy's Own Story

I saw that The Skeptic has been posting on my blog. I'll allow it. He's not wrong that swimming is hard, and he's not wrong that most triathletes are stuck.

But he's too gentle about the reason, and too quick to blame talent for it. So let me tell you my story, because talent is exactly the thing I want to talk about.

I grew up in a swim family. My mom swam in college. My two older brothers both went on to represent Team USA and became multiple-time All-Americans, one at Texas, one at Kentucky. My oldest brother was a world champion who swam a relay alongside Michael Phelps at the 2005 World Championships. So yes, there were genes in the water. But here's the thing about being the youngest in a family of stars. All that pedigree, and I was the runt. Undersized. Unremarkable. The brother the recruiters didn't call.

Unrecruited, Walk-On

And I mean that literally. Coming out of high school, I was unrecruited. The only coaches who showed any interest were the ones who already knew my brothers personally, and let's be honest, they were being polite. I walked on at Kentucky, on the same team as my older brother, as the guy nobody had bet on. Not a scholarship kid. A walk-on.

And then, finally, I started to improve. Not because someone rebuilt my stroke. Because for the first time I was training with real structure, and my body responded to it. I won Freshman of the Year, which for a kid nobody recruited was a small miracle. Then I transferred to Virginia Tech, and that's where it all came together. My junior year I won the ACC title in the 100 backstroke, made All-American in the 200, and qualified for the 2012 Olympic Trials. My senior year I was one of the best backstrokers in the country, and in November 2012 I posted the fastest 100 back in the nation.

The Training Changed Me

Sit with that arc for a second. Unrecruited runt to the number one time in the country. Nobody swapped my genes out along the way. What changed was the training.

I turned pro after that, swam for the New York Athletic Club, worked with brands like Nike and Vitargo. Then I retired and got into coaching, at Florida International University, where we put together the most successful season in the school's history. Undefeated. The first Conference USA Championship in any sport FIU had ever won. Turns out the thing that made me fast, structure over gifts, worked even better when I was the one building it for other people.

5 Years Without Swimming

Then life did the thing life does. I left the sport and became a police officer. And while I was working, a drunk driver hit me, and left me with a serious neck and back injury. That's how I ended up back in a pool, this time for rehab, slowly, painfully, rebuilding.

And that's where the whole triathlon thing started, completely by accident. Back in the water, I started swimming around triathletes. And what I saw stopped me cold. These were driven, fit, accomplished people, grinding away at the swim, and almost every one of them was training it wrong. Piling up junk yardage. No structure. No idea what they were actually doing or why. And worst of all, nowhere to turn for the real thing. No coach they could actually reach. Just apps, and forums, and a pile of contradictory advice from people who'd never swum fast in their lives.

TRI Swim Club Was Born

That gap is the whole reason this exists. I built TRI Swim Club to give adult triathletes, anywhere in the world, access to actual high-level swim training, and something nobody in this space offers: a real person, a former pro, who you can actually contact and get a straight answer from. Not a faceless app. Not AI-generated nonsense. A coach.

And it worked, fast. The community trusted it, because it was real. I started working with pro athletes like Joe Skipper and Megan Armitage, and watched them make immediate jumps in the water, not from swimming more, but from finally training the right way in the water.

So here's my point, and it's the reason I can promise this blog will actually help you. I am not the guy who was born to be fast. I was the overlooked little brother in a family of champions, too small and too unremarkable for anyone to recruit. Everything I got in the water, I got through the work and the training, not the gifts. And if that's how a runt walk-on became the number one backstroker in the country, then "I'm just not a swimmer" is not the excuse you think it is.

The Skeptic thinks talent decides who makes the pack. I'm living proof it doesn't. The training does.

Read on.

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