From the Editor: The View From the High Dive

That’s Gretchen Walsh (Com class of ’25) on the cover, collegiate swimming’s woman of the year, who gave the performance of a generation at the spring NCAA Division 1 Championships.

You’re seeing her through the lens of Adam Ewing. As she demonstrated the hydrodynamic beauty of her record-setting butterfly, our photographer lay on his belly over the edge of the UVA Aquatic & Fitness Center high dive to capture it. Hanging over Ewing, and hunched over a laptop, was Virginia Magazine Creative Director Steve Hedberg, watching as fresh images populated his design template.

As rarely happens, we knew going in what our cover line would say. The words “Crazy Fast,” in combination and each on its own, distill the constituent elements of head coach Todd DeSorbo’s unconventional approach to collegiate swimming—controlled chaos producing unmitigated speed.

The challenge was how to convey that visually. In some sense we picked the exact wrong exemplar. Walsh’s sprint records give her credible claim as the fastest woman in history, but so much of her speed comes from her maximal underwater kick—a perfect streamline that, confound it, creates no observable disturbance.

Overhead shots of her racing start off the blocks were simply astounding but didn’t suit our purposes either. With a barely discernable ripple, she disappears into the water, like a magic trick.

We struck gold with the power of Walsh’s butterfly and backstroke, as we hope she will do in Paris this summer. She told us her rangy backstroke comes from being double-jointed. You’ll find Ewing’s freeze frame of it inside, part of our profile of the DeSorbo era of UVA swimming.

As you can gather, it was a lengthy photo shoot. We imposed on Walsh, an Academic All-American, just two weeks before exams and not many more weeks before the U.S. Olympic trials. She could not have been more gracious, including climbing up to the diving platform to confer with Ewing and Hedberg. 

In that respect, she was a perfect exemplar of UVA Swimming & Diving. The coaches granted us unfettered access to the athletes, the practices and themselves. Most of the interviews took place during spring break because, sadly, swimmers don’t really get one; at their elite level, there is no off-season.

To tell the story of Power Rack Day, assistant coach Joe Bonk helped me go several rounds with one of the rigs myself. Space and pride prevent a fuller report on that wild experience. By the next day my rotator cuff and I could write again.

UVA Swimming’s small but mighty fan base—swim parents and diehard alumni—could not have been more welcoming either. I learned more about the sport embedded with them in the stands at the NCAAs in Athens, Georgia, than impersonating a sportswriter in the media section. After the meet, they let me join them back at the hotel for the team’s late-night victory dinner.

There, Katherine Nelson, mother of swimmer Ella Nelson (Educ class of ’23, Com class of ’24), struck a familiar theme, recalling those meetings with the coach in the early days, when all DeSorbo had to show recruits were the strength of his convictions and the power of his personality. “Todd was undeniable. He was someone who these girls wanted to swim for,” she said.

In his own remarks, DeSorbo didn’t look back. He looked ahead. Before anybody had cut into the sheet cake to savor 2024, he was already talking about 2025. It seemed a little crazy, and awfully fast.

Richard Gard (Col class of ’81)
Vice President, Communications,
UVA Alumni Association