Ryan Torie, a 2016 Springside Chestnut Hill Academy graduate who will swim for the University of North Carolina, is headed out to the U.S. Olympic Trials this week.

by Tom Utescher

After excelling at the Inter-Ac League meet and the Eastern Interscholastic Championships at the end of the winter swimming season, a few area athletes have continued on to pursue even loftier goals.

Ryan Torie, who has just graduated from Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, and Reece Whitley, a rising junior at Penn Charter, are both heading out to Omaha, Neb. this week for the 2016 U.S. Olympic Trials, which run from June 26 to July 3.

Whitley, the 6’8” phenom who was named Sports Illustrated’s 2015 Sports Kid of the Year, has qualified in the 200 meter breast stroke, while Torie, who signed with the University of North Carolina last fall, met the standard in the 50 meter freestyle.

Whitley had a banner year in 2015, shattering age-group records in his specialty stroke. At the U.S. Swimming championships last summer, his time in the 200 breast in the juniors division exactly matched that of Michael Phelps in the open age group.

After a dominating performance in his top events during the scholastic regular season and at the Inter-Ac championships, Whitley set new meet records in the 100 yard breast stroke and the 200 yard individual medley at the 2016 Eastern championships. He was named MVP of that meet.

Due to the extraordinary media attention that has been focused on Whitley in recent months, it was decided that he would not do interviews in the period directly leading up to the Olympic trials. A full feature story on the ascending star appeared in the December 3, 2015 edition of the Local.

Springside Chestnut Hill’s Ryan Torie didn’t know it at the time, but back when he was going into the fifth grade, he made what would turn out to be an ironic school switch. He’d been attending Germantown Academy, located just 10 minutes from his home and boasting a national class swimming program, and he changed over to what was then all-male Chestnut Hill Academy, which had no swim team and no pool.

Torie, who didn’t begin to swim competitively until the relatively advanced age of 13, had no idea back then of how much time he would come to spend in the water. There was no swimming background in his family, and by his own description, he was relatively unathletic as a youngster.

When he progressed into middle school at Chestnut Hill and was allowed to play various sports, he tried them all. He got into much better shape, developed his overall athletics IQ, and eventually discovered his prowess for sprint swimming.

As a freshman, he placed sixth in the 50 yard freestyle and fourth in the 100 at the Inter-Ac championships, and he moved up rapidly after that. The following winter, he won the 50 at the league meet, and was third in the 100.

The merged school known as Springside Chestnut Hill Academy has routinely had a few dozen girls who swim, but for much of his high school career, Torie was the only male swimmer representing the school. As a senior, he was joined by one freshman, J.P. Dencker.

The Blue Devils had to practice far from campus, but Torie actually did most of his individual training with the Germantown Academy Aquatic Club.

As a junior and senior he was the 50 and 100 freestyle champion in the Inter-Ac, and he wrapped up his senior season by winning both events at Easterns. In 2016 he has gone 20.3 seconds in the 50 (yards), and 44.4 in the 100.

Recipient of the Springside Chestnut Hill’s Lawrence R. Mallery Award as the preeminent scholar athlete in the senior class, Torie made official college visits to Penn, Princeton, Virginia, Indiana, in addition to North Carolina. UNC was his first stop and he knew right away he wanted to become a Tarheel.

“My mother said ‘It’s your first visit, you should go and see the other schools,” he recalled. “She was right, but in the end that feeling about North Carolina was unchanged.”

The SCH senior officially qualified for the 2016 Olympic trials early in April at a meet down in Richmond, Va.

“The qualifying has to be on a long course (a 50-meter pool), which is the tricky part because there aren’t many long course pools around here,” he noted.

The long course, standard at the Olympics and international championships, doesn’t require 50 freestyle racers to make a turn, so it can require a bit of an adjustment for many young swimmers. Still, Torie said there was no need for him to seek out a long course facility for most of his training.

He explained, “The coach that I work with at GA, Donny Brush, has been involved with training Olympic swimmers, and a lot of the top guys didn’t practice that much long course. It’s more about the conditioning and explosiveness and power that you get out of training.”

At this level, swimmers are looking to make minor adjustments just to shave fractions of a second off their times.

“In Richmond, I had a good qualifying race,” Torie related, “but my right arm was a bit straighter than I’d like it to be coming out of the water. That slowed down my tempo a little bit, so we’ve been working on that, and we’re always working on breath-control stuff.”

With the turn eliminated from a 50 freestyle race, he pointed out, “If you can just go that 50 without taking a breath, that immediately takes off about two-tenths of a second. The kick is important too, because without a turn to rest your arms, they start to really get tired after about 40 meters, and you really need your kick over that last 10.”

Joining Torie in Omaha for the trials in the 50 freestyle will be former Penn Charter standout Jamal Willis, who is now a rising senior at Lehigh University. A former Inter-Ac League record holder and back-to-back 50 freestyle champ at Eastern’s, Willis became Lehigh’s Freshman Swimmer of the Year in the 2013-14 season.

At the 2016 Patriot League Championships, he was the runner-up in the 50 free for the third year in a row, and he holds the school record in that event. He was also part of relay teams that set new Lehigh records in the 200 medley and the 400 free. A business management major, Willis met the Olympic trials qualifying standard in the 50 free back in December.

The trials began on Sunday, June 26, but the 50 freestyle competition doesn’t begin until Friday, and Torie plans to fly out two days ahead of time. He would love to earn a spot on the team, but there will be dozens of collegiate and post-college athletes dueling for the same spots. It will still be a valuable experience, even as a dress rehearsal.

“The real goal is 2020, when I will have just finished college,” he said. “I think I’ll learn a lot by going to trials this year, so that the next time around it won’t be a completely new experience.”