It’s Different Stroke for Different Folks

Richard Hunter, one of the faster 100-yard breaststroke swimmers this year, wants badly to win the Southern Section Division I championship in the event.

Yet, the Mission Viejo Trabuco Hills senior has competed in his specialty exactly once this season, an indication of just how deep the Mustangs are in the event.

“We have so many good breaststrokers on our team,” Hunter said, “that they don’t really need me to do it.”

Trabuco Hills, with three swimmers expected to record sub-minute times in the event by the end of the season and as many as five projected to be at or near 1:04.00, is simply the best reflection among Southland teams of a season saturated with talented breaststrokers.

“It’s pretty rare to have so many guys going this fast,” Trabuco Hills Coach Andy Garcia said. “It’s a tough event to be fast at, and I don’t know what to attribute it to. But sometimes you get these crops.”

Like Garcia, USC Coach Mark Schubert, who is also the U.S. Olympic team coach, attributes the bumper crop of breaststrokers largely to chance and coincidence, but says it is unusual because the event is the most complicated of the four basic strokes.

“Breaststroke is a very unique event in that it’s a lot of technique and timing. Not everybody can do it,” Schubert said.

He and other coaches agree that increasingly sophisticated coaching techniques and concentrated searches for potential standouts have helped swell the ranks at all levels.

“Breaststrokers have kind of an outward step. They walk kind of like a duck,” said Dave Salo, coach of the Irvine Novaquatics. “As a coach, you kind of see those things when you’re looking down on the pool deck, and go, ‘Ah, you’re a breaststroker.’ ”

Great flexibility of the knees and ankles is also a must and a compact build is typical.

Aaron Peirsol, the world record-holder in the 200-meter backstroke, never mastered the stroke, and it hampered his ability to challenge 400-meter intermediate medley world record-holder Michael Phelps in that event.

“As much as I tried to work with Aaron on it because he was a pretty good IM-er, he could never get his breaststroke to fall in line,” Salo said of the former Newport Harbor standout.

“I can take on Phelps or anyone in the first half of the IM,” Peirsol said, “but the breaststroke is so crucial. If you’re a good breaststroker and the other person isn’t, the difference is staggering.”

This year’s group of standouts has benefited from myriad drills used to teach the undulating, pull-kick-glide motion of the stroke.

Chooch Petoscia, the coach and founder of the Woodland Hills-based Sting Rays club team, employs 22 drills and focuses on technique and efficiency.

“You can have all the conditioning you want, but if you don’t have the strokes, you’re not going anywhere,” he said.

Trabuco Hills boasts not only Hunter but also Doug Smith, Chris Aikey, Justin Kingma and Jimmy Wood among the best in the breast. The Mustangs, however, are far from the only team so blessed.

Anaheim Servite, which has senior Adam Hewko, the defending Division I champion in the event, as well as Irvine, with second-place finisher Evan Hsiao, Lake Forest El Toro, Irvine University and Irvine Northwood each has two contenders for the section finals.

In Division I girls’ competition, defending-champion Nicolette Teo, a Mission Viejo senior, returns, as does runner-up Jessica Hardy, a Long Beach Wilson junior who wowed spectators at Friday’s Long Beach Wilson Invitational with a meet-record clocking of 1:01.62.

In Division II, two-time champion and La Canada junior Maryann Boosalis is expected to be challenged by Corona del Mar freshman sensation Stephanie Gabert.

“There’s a lot of good ones out there,” said Irvine’s Hsiao, the Division I boys’ runner-up in 2003. “Last year, Adam Hewko kind of had it in the bag, and everybody knew he was going to win it. This year, I think it’s going to be anybody’s race.”