Fresh off a senior season that garnered him a pair of All-America honors, West Virginia Mountaineer Bryce Bohman has headed to the desert to join Tuscon Ford Dealers Aquatics for his summer training.
Bohman has been West Virginia’s undisputed star swimmer the past several seasons, wrapping up his career with a pair of 5th place finishes at the NCAA Championships in March. Swimming in the ultra-competitive backstroke races, Bohman took fifth in both the 100 (45.29) and 200 (1:39.83) backs – “I couldn’t have been happier with how the season went,” Bohman said. “I accomplished everything I wanted to.” Bohman also put up all 28 of West Virginia’s points at NCAAs, single-handedly placing the team 23rd in the nation.
Now graduated from WVU, Bohman has headed to Tuscon to join the well-known postgrad group run by Rick “Rocket” DeMont and the University of Arizona staff. Bohman says the decision to switch up his summer training came from a conversation with West Virginia coach Vic Riggs.
“We talked about how I’d never been exposed to long course training outside of a week or two here and there,” Bohman said. “I started looking into some programs, and Vic thought training with ‘Rocket’ in Arizona would be really good for me.”
Bohman is something of an interesting case when it comes to long course training. Though he’s one of the top backstrokers in the nation in the short course format, his experience in the Olympic-sized pool has been much more sparse.
“I trained long course when I was a club swimmer, up until I was 14,” Bohman said. “But then I didn’t really swim long course again until I was 21.”
The closest long course training facility for West Virginia’s summer program is about an hour away in Pittsburgh, according to Bohman, and so his typical summers involved training short course and competing sporadically in long course.
“I have probably the least amount of long course training possible,” Bohman said with a laugh. “I think just getting acclimated to the pool and racing long course more consistently will be a huge boost to me this summer.
After summer season, Bohman will return to West Virginia, where he’s beginning work on his Master’s degree in athletic coaching. He’ll spend the school year training with WVU but plans to return to Tuscon again next summer.
Splitting seasons with multiple programs is a unique training setup, but one that somewhat fits with Bohman’s background. The backstroker is well-versed in movement – he was a record-setting Junior College swimmer with Lincoln College in 2011 before spending three seasons at West Virginia (one of which was redshirted). And now he’s already adjusting to DeMont’s Arizona program, and says he sees an advantage in switching up training homes periodically.
“Always getting a new set of eyes on you is such a benefit,” Bohman said. “I’ve only been here two weeks, and Rocket has already changed things up on my backstroke, butterfly and freestyle.”
Bohman says he plans to continue spending his summers with Tuscon Ford and the rest of the year in Morgantown, WV with Riggs and the Mountaineers, at least until the 2016 Olympic Trials. For now, though, the focus is on this summer’s U.S. Nationals and the big national team qualifying opportunity it presents.