Grant House Pursuing Excellence for Arizona State After Two Years Away from College Swimming
The last time Grant House competed in a college championship meet was in March 2019, at the NCAA Championships in Austin, Texas, where he topped out at a 10th-place finish in the 200 freestyle. At the time, House was 20 and already a solid performer on the national stage for Arizona State University, but his 200 free was one of just three individual scoring swims for the Sun Devils at that meet.
Now, House is 23, one of the older swimmers and one of the most experienced swimmers on head coach Bob Bowman’s roster. House missed the 2019-2020 season to take an Olympic redshirt year and prepare for the Trials for the Tokyo Games, “doing my own thing with Coach Bowman and the pro group,” House said.
Then, for the 2020-21 season, Arizona State redshirted the entire team. After the cancellation of the 2020 NCAA Championships because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bowman and his staff did not want to risk swimmers losing a year of eligibility in case the pandemic ruined another championship season.
During the fall of 2020, House began training primarily under Herbie Behm, hired as ASU’s sprint coach. The Sun Devils were out of college competition, so the team focused on simply training for the majority of the year. But once per week, the swimmers would suit up and race in a pseudo-meet designed to replicate normal racing conditions.
“Every Friday, we would put touch pads in. We would go off the blocks. Sometimes we would set up the pool in full meet format. Sometimes it would be long course. Sometimes it would be short course. But making sure we don’t lose that racing element or racing environment,” House said. “We didn’t prepare at all. We didn’t shave or taper. We would put on suits wherever we were at, and we kind of just kept building on that.”
Arizona State returned to college swimming in the fall, and the men’s team delivered a significant statement performance in November at the NC State Invitational in Greensboro, N.C.. At the forefront were IMer Leon Marchand, an Olympic finalist for France at the Tokyo Games, and House, a native of Mainesville, Ohio.
At that meet, House crushed his best time in the 200 free with a 1:31.73, becoming the first man to break 1:32 during the 2021-22 college season, and he also posted elite times in the 200 IM (1:42.05) and 100 free (42.06). House was also a key member of Arizona State 400 and 800 freestyle relay teams that entered the conversation for a top-five finish at the NCAA Championships, along with Marchand, Carter Swift, Cody Bybee and Jack Dolan.
Since Bowman took over the ASU program in the fall of 2015, the Sun Devil men have shown significant improvements on the national stage, finishing as high as 14th at the NCAA Championships in 2018. But this midseason performance put them in the conversation for their first top-10 finish at the national level.
“The goal was to show what we’ve been working on, what we’ve been doing this whole time and just get a glimpse of what we’re capable of. The world hadn’t really seen it yet. We hadn’t seen it on a stage like that either. It’s just kind of proving to ourselves and anyone who may be doubting us what we’re really capable of,” House said.
“And competing with what is the best of our sport. Stanford, NC State, phenomenal teams, year in and year out, perennial powerhouses. Competing on a high stage and not just a mediocre invite where we would easily win but going up across the country, in an entirely different environment and competing with the best of the best and seeing where we fall.”
Olympic Trials Opportunity
Shortly before House left for Omaha and the 2021 Olympic Trials, the meet he had been focused on for two full years because of his own redshirt year and then the entire team’s redshirt year, House felt an old rib injury flare up.
“It felt like someone was taking a knife and sticking it in my ribs. Something just triggered a huge pain response, and for five days, within two weeks of Olympic Trials, I wasn’t able to swim anything besides moderate freestyle,” House said, who laughed at the fact that he could not swim three of the four strokes he needed for his 200 IM. “I remember telling Herbie, ‘I don’t care what happens. Nothing is going to stop me from performing at Olympic Trials.”
Grant House competing for Arizona State earlier this season
House remembers walking into the venue for the first time with Carson Foster, a fellow Ohioan and someone House referred to as “basically a younger pseudo-brother.” As the two looked around the warmup pool, House thought, “It was just less of a big deal to me.” He credited his work on mental training with Behm over the previous year for putting himself into a spot where he could be calm and confident in his own training and abilities, despite a meet that yields high levels of stress for even the most elite swimmers.
“All the practices the year before, I cannot thank Herbie enough because every day was just how I can be the best version of myself, what I can control, the factors that I internally control about myself without concern about anything else: waking up in the morning, journaling, reading, having the food that I want. I can control those factors, get my thoughts in line and handle the rest of it. It was really just a test of internal discipline for me,” House said
“Every single night, I went to bed with my head on that pillow knowing I gave everything I could. I prepared the best I could and did as well as I could. Just the gratitude to be in that event and competing with the best and just proving to myself that I get to race against the best in the world and that I am part of that group as well. It’s the ultimate opportunity.”
In his first race in Omaha, House ended up 17th in the 200 free, more than a second off his best time and missing out on a spot in the semifinals by just three hundredths, but he caught a break when two of the swimmers ranked ahead of him, Caeleb Dressel and Ryan Held, scratched to focus on other events. He took advantage of the opportunity in the semifinals and improved his time to 1:47.28, leaving him 11th and narrowly outside the top eight. Still, that performance was a strong indicator that House belonged in the conversation of the country’s top 200 freestylers.
House ended up just missing out on two other occasions during the meet as he tied for 17th in the 100 free and then took ninth in the 200 IM, where he swam under 2:00 for the first time. Finally, “I got to end the meet with the 50 freestyle on my birthday at Olympic Trials. Like, come on. You can’t ask for much more than that. It was a great opportunity.”
The Vision for Arizona State Swimming
When House committed to swim for Arizona State, he was coming to a program with very little history of swimming success, but the team was under the direction of Bowman, one of the most well-known swim coaches in the world after he guided Michael Phelps to five Olympic Games and 23 gold medals, the most of any Olympian in history. Right away, House was galvanized to help Bowman bring that level of achievement to the college level.
“It’s pretty inspiring and kind of almost incomprehensible sometimes,” House said of swimming for Bowman. “With the NCAA circuit being short course yards, we have our opportunity to do what hasn’t been the main focus of his career all the time, and I find that really empowering.”
Bowman arrived in Tempe in 2015 with a vision for what success in swimming looked like and how to achieve it, and after almost five years in the program already, House has become a firm believer in those teachings.
“Bob is a big believer that it’s not these miraculous moments that we rise to the occasion to every time,” House said. “It’s that performance will ultimately sink to the lowest level that you maintain on a constant basis. And that’s been really inspiring to me. If I can make my worst day better than everyone else’s best day, that’s the key. That’s a level of excellence that we try and maintain here.”
Unfortunately for the Sun Devils, their worst moments have come at inopportune times in past championship seasons, but House believes the key to overcoming those obstacles “is just staying healthy and doing what the coaches tell us to do.” He listed a myriad of circumstances that have derailed past ASU teams, including multiple swimmers contracting mononucleosis and the flu and even one swimmer falling off a bicycle and breaking an arm the day before leaving for the Pac-12 Championships.
House has been stymied on numerous occasions by illnesses and injuries, and this season is no exception. Following the midseason meet, House ended up battling both influenza and COVID, and just prior to the Sun Devils’ final dual meet against Arizona State, House hit his head on a doorframe and felt foggy for a few days after, and although he was not diagnosed at the time, trainers determined later that he probably had a mild concussion. But House was fine by the time he got to the meet, and he ended up swimming a 1:32.18 in the 200 free, faster than any other swimmer had recorded all season up to that point.
While he certainly hopes to have gotten his injuries out of the way prior to championship season, just being able to handle these challenges and stay on course has been encouraging.
“I pretty much hit 50% of my December training which, in the past, would have freaked me out, but a lot of work with Bob and Herbie on my mental state, just handling things, going through a meet and a season, just maturing and developing, really brought a lot of ease and back to center for me,” House said.
Now, it’s performance time, with the Sun Devils competing this week at the Pac-12 Championships in Federal Way, Wash., and then three weeks later at the NCAA Championships in Atlanta. This is the best men’s team that Arizona State has put together during Bowman’s tenure and thus the most significant meets, and House knows that both his performance and his leadership as an upperclassman will be critical in that effort.
“If we can be the best version of ourselves every day, each individual, then as a collective group, we’re going to be the best version we can be,” he said. “What we can do is bring our best intent, our best practice, our best effort and our best focus every day, and outside the pool as well, to put ourselves in the best possible spot. The results have continually shown that ASU is getting better and better, and if anything gets in the way, we’ll adjust, adapt and address what needs to be. It’s exciting.”
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Sounds a lot like the wisdom of one Coach Keefe, “doing a little better each day.”