Jan. 30, 2007

AMHERST, Mass. - In basketball you can't teach height. And in football, rushing the passer is awfully hard when the guy standing in front of you weighs 300 pounds. It's a lot easier for a 6-foot-5 pitcher to throw 90-plus than it is for a 5-foot-9 pitcher. The point of all of this is that in most sports, skills are vital but size is at a premium.

Swimming, however, is not one of these sports. And as far as UMass senior Evan Swisher is concerned, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Standing 6-foot-1 and weighing 180 pounds, Evan is anything but small. But when he steps to the starting block flanked by a 6-foot-4 swimmer and a 6-foot-3 swimmer, he may be smaller but there is just one thing on the mind of this Bennington, Vt., native - "These guys can't touch me."

"I guess what I like about [swimming] is that it's a sport where it's not really about size and strength. It's about skill," Evan says. "So I can be up against some kid who's 6-foot-3, 6-foot-4 and he may be a lot bigger and stronger than I am, but if he doesn't have the same kind of feel for the water, I can beat him."

That very feel for the water is what enabled Evan to not just swim at such a high level, but succeed and become the accomplished swimmer he has become.

Swimming has been a part of Evan's life for as long as he can remember. He started swimming competitively at the age of seven. His older sister swam in meets all around New England and Evan's parents dragged him along for the ride. Eventually Evan decided that the role of spectator just wasn't for him and asked his parents to sign him up.

It started out, as sports to do for most children, as just something to do - a pastime whose only real purpose is to teach children different lessons about life. But as he matured and spent more time in the pool, it was obvious to anyone watching that Evan wasn't just swimming. He was winning, and easily at that. And at the age of 10, Evan qualified for the United States Eastern Zone Meet held at Princeton University.

The best young swimmers from different zones in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States were there. Evan recalls this as the first time he realized swimming could be more to him than just another activity. He performed very well in his first test against nationally renowned competition. One event in particular sticks out in Evan's mind. It was a third-place finish, but considering what he now knows about the winner of this particular race, third place was pretty good.

"I raced [Olympic gold-medalist] Michael Phelps actually in the [50-yard] backstroke and I came in third, he obviously won," Evan says. "He set a national record or something."

Around the age of 12, however, Evan began to gravitate away from swimming. It was still something he enjoyed doing, but as a 12-year-old boy in Vermont, your peers don't exactly shower you with praise for being a gifted swimmer. Very close to quitting the sport altogether at age of 14, Evan took place in another Eastern Zone Meet and again something happened that became a benchmark in his swimming career.

"When I was 14 I had been really down on swimming for a long time," Evan recalls. "But I went to the Eastern Zone Meet again and I dropped two full seconds off my [100-yard backstroke] time in one day. That really got me charged back up about swimming."

Since then, swimming has remained a large part of Evan's life and is something he genuinely loves to do. He competed in high school but the competition wasn't really up to par. As most NCAA Division I swimmers do, Evan competed for a series of club teams to improve and to compete against first-class competition - the last of these club teams was the Adirondack Bluefins. Evan continued his progression as a swimmer under the watchful eye of his coaches and became one of the club's better swimmers and one of Vermont's best.

Planning to swim at the collegiate level, Evan registered with the NCAA Clearinghouse, hoping to be recruited by coaches from Division I swimming programs, or so he thought. The process seemed simple enough and Evan appeared destined for a place in a top-flight swimming program. There was just one problem - he didn't get any responses. Not that he got responses from schools he wasn't interested in, he got no responses whatsoever - no phone calls, no e-mails, nothing.

Resigned to the fact that he wouldn't get any offers, Evan decided UMass was the place for him, whether swimming was to be part of college for him or not. Evan did still want to swim, so he reached out to UMass men's swimming coach Russ Yarworth, whose response was encouraging but slightly confusing at the same time.

"When I signed up for the Clearinghouse, on my mom's credit card, they thought her '1' was a '7.' So it didn't go through, they just canceled it, and I should've checked online to make sure it passed but I didn't," Evan regrets. "So I ended up contacting Russ to see if I could swim for him. He told me I could but I'd need to register with the Clearinghouse first."

Years of training and practice to fine tune his skills nearly went to waste because of a misread digit. But Evan amended the situation, re-filed with the Clearinghouse and enrolled at UMass.

Evan has maintained his excellence in the backstroke throughout his time as a swimmer, and has been the best in the backstroke for the Minutemen since he arrived in Amherst - more specifically the 200-yard backstroke. One would think that Evan's success in the event is why he considers it his favorite. But the reason he provided demonstrates the heady approach to swimming that Yarworth demands from his swimmers and transformed Evan from just another collegiate swimmer into a nationally renowned backstroke specialist.

"It's the event that I'm best in but also, it's still a sprint but my stroke really fits the 200 the best," Swisher declares. "I feel like I'm rushing when I swim the 100 and even more when I do a 50. But when I swim the 200, it just feels so natural."

Evan used that feel for the 200-yard backstroke to etch himself a permanent place in the UMass record books. As a freshman, he won the Atlantic 10 Championship in the event - recording a time of 1:51.68. In November of this year, Evan broke the school record in the event with a time of 1:48.63 - former UMass swimmer Justin Houck established the mark during the 2001-02 season.

"I was really happy for Evan. I told him after the race that a huge monkey just walked out of here," Yarworth said after Evan broke the record at Boston University in November. "He's worked really hard and it was just really cool for him and for me."

Since Swisher's victory, George Washington's David Zenk has won the event both times at the A-10 Championships. But the loss that hurt Evan the most was UMass' second-place finish at the A-10 Championships last season - Saint Bonaventure unseated the Minutemen as conference team champions for the first time in five years.

"It'd be great to win [the 200-yard backstroke] again," Evan says. "But my goals for this year are to win the A-10 [Team] Championship again and I want to get NCAA consideration."

Achieving the goals he sets for himself in the pool is, obviously, of the utmost importance to Evan, but he refuses to be defined as just a swimmer. He took part in the UMass student orchestra as a cellist - he is also an accomplished pianist. He played in various school orchestras while in high school and junior high as well. The major Evan selected also allowed him to find an aspect of UMass that appealed to him.

"I like UMass because it's big enough that you can sort of make what you want out of it," Evan says. "I'm a social thought and political economy major and it's a really small major so it kind of shrinks the size of the school."

The program also introduced Evan to a few areas of study that peak his interest greatly.

"My favorite classes are philosophy and sociology courses," Evan says. "I like toying around with the different ideas. But some of the politics stuff just gets kind of dry."

Entering his final semester at UMass, Evan is forced to confront his future. At the moment, he doesn't really know what he is going to do or who he is going to be. Evan provided a few suggestions as to what he may do for a living when he leaves the Pioneer Valley for good.

"I'm not really sure. I don't have a specific career path lined up or anything. There's going to be a few years of figuring things out," Evan says. "I don't know, I really don't know. I could go any number of different ways but I'm going to need a few years to figure it out. I think swimming will always be there and coaching will always be something to fall back on, especially if I go the grad school route."

But considering one of his suggestions, it doesn't appear to be a topic he is too concerned about at this very moment.

"I wouldn't be surprised if I end up being a ski bum or something and working at a mountain giving kids snowboard lessons," Evan jokes. "I worked at a mountain for two years in high school teaching three-to-five-year-olds how to ski. It was really fun."