By Katie Lively, Swimming World College Intern
Sid Farber didn’t commit to swimming competitively until his sophomore year of high school. At that time, his priority was still playing pitcher for his high school baseball team. Only in the spring of his junior year did he give up baseball to focus on swimming.
Now, having just finished his senior year, he will swim the 50 free at the U.S. Olympic Trials.
“It’s been a very quick ascension,” Farber said.
Farber, who trains in Portland, Oregon, goes into the Trials ranked 88th in the 50 free with a time of 23.05. He is the second-fastest qualifier from Oregon. The fastest is Colin Eaton, 21, who enters the meet with a 23.00— the current Oregon state record.
Farber hopes to sneak under 23 seconds and break Eaton’s record.
He likely wouldn’t even be swimming if not for a lack of viable options during his baseball offseason.
The 17-year-old first became familiar with the water as a toddler, taking his first swim lesson at age 2. He swam for a country club league during his childhood in Virginia. Not long before his family moved to New Jersey, his dad, Jeff Farber, signed him up for a local club team.
He did it for a while, but he wasn’t interested in it. That, it seemed, was the end of Farber’s swimming experiment.
Farber did not return to the water until his sophomore year of high school. At the end of the fall, his baseball coach advised him to work with a personal trainer until spring ball started.
The trainer asked for $50 per session. Jeff Farber asked his son, who did not play a winter sport, if he would consider swimming instead.
“He said he was out of shape,” Jeff Farber said. “I told him it would make him a better pitcher.”
He estimated that his son was the third best swimmer on the team by the end of his sophomore year.
Farber placed third in the 50 and seventh in the 100 free at the New Jersey state meet as a junior, leading his dad to prompt him to join a club team. This time, he joined a YMCA team— a team that had previously refused to give him a tryout.
It was that spring that he and his family started talking about a college swimming scholarship.
“I said, ‘Sid, if you want to pursue a scholarship in swimming, you’ve got to commit to that. They won’t want to hear about baseball,’” Jeff Farber said.
Farber ultimately decided to quit the sport he had been doing his whole life in order to focus on swimming.
He credited his high school swim coach from Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School in New Jersey, Zach Wilson, for motivating him to stick with swimming.
“It’s about focus and discipline and hard work,” Farber said. “He kept me focused and encouraged me to continue on my swimming and made me realize I had something that other people didn’t, and I needed to combine that natural gift with hard work.”
Farber began training with Portland Aquatic Club (PAC) when his family moved again, this time to Oregon, at the end of last summer.
Photo Courtesy: Jeff Farber
“He has a background, but not the typical base that probably your typical kid will have at Trials,” said PAC coach Jody Braden.
Rather than naming a particular set he likes to give Farber, Braden said his priority with Farber in training is drill work. Specifically, he often has Farber do a drill with a paddle over his head to work on his breath control.
“He’s not ready to swim a 50 without taking a breath yet,” Braden said.
His breath control nearly cost him a trip to the Olympic Trials. Farber described the Western Zone Speedo Senior Sectionals as feeling like his last chance to qualify for the Trials, since he would not taper again until summer. Neither he nor his coach wanted to wait until the individual 50 free at the end of the meet when he would likely be tired, so he led off the men’s 200 free relay earlier in the meet.
Farber said his goal was to take one breath over the course of the 50.
“I took a breath and all I got was water,” Farber said. “I felt like I needed another one so I took another one.”
That may have cost him the Trials standard. He missed the cut by two tenths of a second, which he said was the amount of time added by the second breath.
“Now I know what it feels like to not make it,” Farber told himself after the race. “Now let’s go make it.”
Farber was scheduled to swim the 200 free that afternoon. Since he is not a 200 freestyler – in fact, he had never done a long course 200 free before – Braden gave him permission to try for the cut on his opening 50.
“I told coaches to put their arms in the air on my last 50 if I made it,” Farber said. “They put their arms in the air.”
Farber now aims to break the state record at the Trials, but he will attempt to do so on only a partial taper. Braden said he is waiting to do a full taper until the U.S. Open and Junior Nationals, where he will compete alongside his PAC teammates. A week later, Farber will leave for the University of Denver, where he will receive the swimming scholarship that motivated him to drop baseball.
Farber and his teammates do not begin training at a long course pool until Monday, so Braden estimates he’ll have just 12-13 long course workouts prior to the Trials.
That said, he already has a goal for the 2020 Olympic Trials: Final in the 50 free.
“He’s a young sprinter. We’re excited to see what his potential is,” Braden said. “We’re sending him off to college with a Trials cut and are excited for that.”