Hedgepeth Seeks Return to Games

It has been seven years since Whitney Hedgepeth won a national championship, but Friday she won her seventh national title in her seventh different event at the Phillips 66 spring national championships.

“I never thought about that,” Hedgepeth, 24, said after edging Barbara Bedford in the women’s 100-meter backstroke with a time of 1 minute 2.36 seconds.

Hedgepeth, who also won the 200 backstroke Thursday, reflects the latest trend in swimming--longevity. A 1988 Olympian, she has joined other Olympians, among them Janet Evans, Summer Sanders and Ron Karnaugh, who have decided to prolong their careers for one more chance in Atlanta this summer.

Hedgepeth left a job as a sixth-grade English teacher in Austin, Texas, to reenter the pool at the University of Texas, where she was a multiple NCAA champion.

“I hated it,” she said of teaching. “It was like baby-sitting.”

But like other members of the older generation, she has been surprised.

“Girls who were 14 when I was 20 have passed me in size,” she said. “They are more womanly than me.”

And then there are new faces, such as Shannon Cullen of Redlands, who won the 200-meter individual medley Thursday. Cullen, 15, was edged in the 400 IM Friday by another teenager, Corrie Murphy, 16, of Seattle.

But Hedgepeth was not the only familiar face to perform well Friday. Resident national team member Tripp Schwenk continued a strong comeback by winning the 100 backstroke in 56.39 seconds, almost a second faster than second-place Matt Ulrickson. Schwenk won the 200 backstroke Thursday night and has emerged as the country’s top backstroker heading into the Olympic trials at Indianapolis next month.

Richelle Depold, former UCLA star now training with the resident team at Colorado Springs, Colo., won the 100 butterfly; and Eric Namesnik, the 1992 silver medalist, won the 400 IM convincingly over Poland’s Piotr Florczyk, who trains at Mission Viejo.

Hedgepeth will swim in her fourth U.S. Olympic trials in March but has not forgotten her first one in 1984, when she was the meet’s youngest competitor at 13.

“I know what it’s like to make it and what it’s like not to make it,” she said. “I’d like to go two for four.”

Even if she does, Hedgepeth is not sure her grade schoolers will be impressed. Although the teachers did a session on the Olympics while she was teaching, the students did not grasp it.

“They’d rather I’d be Michael Jordan,” she said.

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Swim Notes

Suzu Chiba of Japan, swimming for Golden West Swim Club in Huntington Beach, became the U.S. national champion in the 200 freestyle by breaking two minutes. . . . Josh Davis won his second event in Orlando, the 200 freestyle.