With 6 a.m. and 3 p.m. swim practices six times a week, there’s no time to goof around. But Cal Poly swimmer and agricultural systems management sophomore Peter Kline has made time to laugh a little.
“When Pete pulls jokes and pranks, we don’t really mind because he’s doing it to help the other swimmers forget about the fact that they’re in pain,” said Cal Poly swimming and diving assistant coach Phil Yoshida. “He’s doing it to keep things lively. (He would) mix water bottles around and go under someone else’s lane to blow bubbles under them while they’re swimming over top; just funny stuff.”
Kline has earned his time to joke a little. Now toward the end of his second season with the Cal Poly swimming and diving team, Kline has become an individual top scorer for the team and has swum against Olympic gold-medalist Michael Phelps at the 2008 Santa Clara International Meet, where he qualified for the Olympic Trials.
While Phelps placed first in the 400-meter IM, Kline came in third. “I raced against (Phelps) in my heat, which was when I got my trials cut. It was cool watching him later break all those records at the Olympics,” said Kline, who races backstroke and individual medley.
But Kline is also breaking his own records. Last year he set Cal Poly records in the 100 Back at 50.05, 200-meter Back at 1:47.92 and 400-meter IM at 3:54.20. He clocked a time of 1:47.05 for the 200-meter Back finals in the 2009 Southern California Grand Prix of Swimming in Long Beach, breaking his own previous school record of 1:47.92.
American Olympic medalists and Kline’s swimming heroes Ryan Lochte and Matt Grevers were also at the meet, where Kline had the opportunity to race and meet them.
“It was a pretty cool meet. I remember swimming right next to Matt Grevers in his heat for four races. He wasn’t pushing me, but I was trying to catch him. He probably wasn’t trying at all and I was trying as hard as I could,” Kline said laughing.
“They’re men and he’s a stick. It was Lochte and Grevers on the outside and then Peter sitting right next to them,” Yoshida recalled.
Lochte and Grevers are 23- and 24-years-old, respectively, and Kline is only 19.
“He’s motivated, got a great work ethic, and capable of swimming really fast at practice, which translates to swimming really fast at meets,” said swimming and diving head coach Tom Milich who has entered the end of his third coaching season at Cal Poly.
Kline, a Fresno native, knows his successes do not come easy. “When I’m at practice, I’m there to work. I always push myself,” Kline said.
“(The idea of) what I can do inspires me to go fast in practice,” he added.
Yoshida, an assistant coach since 2001, Cal Poly graduate and former swimmer, has worked with Kline for two years and has seen his potential.
“In practice, Peter is a leader,” Yoshida said. “He has an easy-going way of inspiring other people to do as well. He leads by example.
“He’s a likeable-enough guy that I think if he got on people he wouldn’t alienate them. He’s that type of guy you can take whatever from. The fact that he’s inspiring you and at the same time killing himself means a whole lot too.”
With 50 men and women currently on the team, tension can occasionally build.
“Sometimes we get on each other’s nerves,” Kline said. “But for the most part, when we’re doing sprint sets and short anaerobic stuff we’ll be cheering each other on. Everyone’s trying to push each other. It’s nice to have. It’s motivating to go fast.”
But Kline’s interaction with his teammates does not end when he comes out of the pool. He lives in a house with four other people, two of which are also swimmers.
“I hang out with swim team people all day,” he said. “Usually we have a couple guys from swim team over at my house throughout the day. They come over at night and we watch TV shows together like ‘Nip/Tuck’ and Sunday Night Football on our big plasma TV. ”
Rooming with other swimmers and spending endless hours at practices has worked in everyone’s favor. “It creates more of a team thing. The team becomes closer,” Kline said.
Kline won three races in a February dual meet against University of the Pacific, winning the 200-meter Back, the 200-meter Fly at 1:52.30, and the 200-meter IM at 1:55.33. Cal Poly won 132-130 thanks to the Mustangs “A” team’s performance in the 800 Free Relay, which Kline was a part of.
“Every time we put him out, he hasn’t had a bad race,” Yoshida said. “There have been points where he should’ve won. It’s the maturity that he needs to learn how to dig down and not let that happen. He’s got to lead. He’s got it within him. Everyone’s going to gear up for this time of year.”
Kline’s swimming career started when he was very young. “You know when you’re young and your parents throw you into the pool? That was like my first swimming lesson right there. I had on the floaties and they threw me in,” he joked.
But after a near-death experience at the age of 5, his parents decided to have him take swim lessons. “I had a pretty tragic accident when I was a kid. I got swept out into the ocean at the (Santa Cruz Beach) Boardwalk. After that, I kept swimming more and more just because my parents didn’t want me to drown,” he said.
Competitive swimming didn’t start until Kline was 10 when he swam for Clovis Swim Club, then headed by Milich.
Kline competed at Western Zone Swimming when he was 10 and won the 200-meter Free. “It was a big meet of about 750 people. I was stoked (when I won). I set a Western Zones record. It was broken the next year, but I held it,” he recalled.
A lot has changed since his early days as a swimmer.
“Pete has always been this skinny little kid and he’s starting to grow up,” Milich recalled. “He’s starting to put on some muscle mass from being in the weight room. I used to tease him in high school and call him ‘freshman’ because he looked so small. I told him I’d stop calling him (that) once he qualified for Nationals, and his junior year he made Nationals so I had to stop calling him a freshman.”
Kline was a Valley champion in the 200-meter IM at San Joaquin Memorial High School and set Division II records in the 200-meter IM and 500-meter Free.
One of the reasons Kline chose to swim for Cal Poly was because of his long-term swimming relationship with Milich. “Tom is a fun coach to be around. He always jokes around with you. He’s a good coach. He knows what he’s doing, which I like. I like his training methods too,” Kline said.
Milich agreed. “He and I have a pretty good relationship and he swims really good for me. I’m pretty sarcastic. He can deal with that, rather than having someone screaming and shouting at him. I can get kids to swim pretty fast without being too verbally abusive.”
When he’s not working hard at swim practice, Kline likes to gain normalcy by playing video games, water polo, golf and foosball with his roommates. “We’re a big foosball family house. My roommates and I have our own competitive teams. There’ll be some nights where we just keep going at it and we’ll have championship games,” he said.
But Kline owes a lot to his busy swimming career and lifestyle to keep him focused in other areas of his life. “It’s just what I’m used to. If I ever had a day off where I didn’t swim, I’d get so bored,” he said.
The team will return to the big pool at the Big West Championships in Long Beach from Feb. 25 through Feb. 28. Cal Poly is expected to place third or fourth place in the conference, which is a comparative leap from previous years of placing sixth and last year’s fifth.
Kline is preparing to do well in the 400-meter IM and the 100-meter and 200-meter Back. “My coach will want me to get NCAA cuts, but they’re pretty fast this year, which is pretty difficult,” Milich recalled. “I’m definitely going to go for best times, but maybe drop two or three seconds in each event.”
“Peter has a tremendous amount of ability,” Yoshida added. “He’s probably one the best three male swimmers in the conference. He’s capable of winning. He has the potential to be at some point, a NCAA top-16 scorer. I don’t say that lightly. He does have the ability, it’s just going to be a matter of how focused we can be in these next few years,” Milich said.
“He’s put in the work. He worked hard all summer. If he were to get it, he deserves it. He’s still got to work for it.”
And what’s in store for Kline when the 2012 Olympic Trials come around again?
“It depends on where I’m at by senior year,” Kline said. “It’s a really long shot because the national team is really hard to make, but it’s something to aspire for. I’ll probably be more developed, a little bit bigger by the time I’m 23, 24. So that’s when my full potential for swimming would be. Prime time.”