There's just something about the water in Baltimore. Maybe you knew that already, but it's worth repeating. The water here, it enables you to do almost anything. Michael Phelps sprang from these waters. Katie Hoff, too. But the swimming story I hope we'll all be able to appreciate this summer is Philip Scholz's quest to represent the United States in the Paralympics.
Scholz is a freshman at Loyola College. Before I even tell you about what he's able to do in the water, you've got to understand what he has already been through.
Born in Munich, Germany, Scholz moved with his family to Long Island, N.Y., when he was 7. He has been diagnosed with Stickler syndrome, a genetic condition that affects connective tissue, and has endured nearly two dozen surgeries since birth. We're talking everything from his cleft palate to his colon to his ears to his eyes. When he was 6, he lost sight in his left eye. By 15, he lost sight in his right. And at 18, he was sitting across from me at Loyola's Fitness and Aquatic Center last week telling me about how he hopes to compete at the Beijing Paralympics this summer.
"Out on land, if people suddenly feel like running, they can run and not worry too much about things that they see coming. I can't do that, because I can't see that car coming and avoid it," says Scholz, who gets around campus with the aid of Taxi, his 2 1/2 -year-old Labrador retriever. "In the pool, I know where everything is, I can go at my pace, I can go fast. ... I know when the wall is there."
Swimming blind is tricky, but not impossible. Like so many things Scholz encounters, it just requires some modification. Most competitors rely on the black line at the bottom of the pool to swim straight, but Scholz doesn't have that luxury. He also can't see when he's about to approach the wall.
To stay straight, Scholz swims on the far right side of the lane, brushing his hand on the lane divider with each stroke. He has already figured out it takes about 15 strokes for him to swim the 25-yard length of the pool, so once his silent count hits 15, he prepares for his slightly modified flip turn.
He has help for big races. His coaches stand at either end of the pool holding a "tapper" -- a cane with a tennis ball plugged onto one end -- and when Scholz approaches the wall, they tap him on the head.
Simple, right? At least Scholz makes it sound that way. And watching him in the pool, he looks like any other swimmer. Not everyone seems to understand, though.
His mother, Ariana Scholz, talks about the family's trip last year to a nearby college -- she won't name the school -- and a meeting with the swim coach that turned into a disaster. They tried explaining how Scholz manages in the water, and they shared his times with the coach. "I have girls that swim faster than that," the coach told them.
"Philip literally broke down," his mother says. "It was just horrible. I knew how important this was to him, and that whole experience was so tough. It took me a while to get the courage to call the next coach."
A couple weeks later, she did pick up the phone, and the next coach happened to be Brian Loeffler at Loyola. The family drove to Baltimore and met him. There was about five minutes of questions before Loeffler told Scholz: "I'd love to have you on our team here."
Says Scholz: "Any apprehension was gone pretty much from the moment I met the man."
Loeffler quickly adopted the family's approach to Scholz's blindness -- that seeing and believing are different things. Even as their son was in and out of doctors' offices as a child, the Scholzes enrolled him in space camp, watched him act in school plays, took him to Disney World and threw elaborate Halloween parties.
And they introduced him to competitive swimming.
"We never wanted Philip's blindness to be the focal point," his mother says. "It's like homework or something -- let's do it and then we'll turn to the real life. I always said when he's grown-up, I want him to look back on his childhood and not just see all these surgeries and problems. I want him to say that he loved his childhood."
It was important to Scholz and his family that he embark on a typical college existence, which is why Scholz chose a school 250 miles away from his home and family.
The Scholzes came for four days, walked all over campus, retraced their steps countless times for their son and Taxi. His mother says she wanted to extend her visit just to be absolutely certain that her son could get around on his own. "He told me he'd call security and have me escorted off the campus," Ariana Scholz says with a laugh.
Scholz finally hit the Loyola pool about a week before practices officially began. No one had seen Scholz swim before, and Michael Hoffman, the Greyhounds' assistant coach, quickly called Loeffler over. "He said to me, 'You've got to see this guy swim; it's unbelievable,'" Loeffler says. " 'You're not going to believe it until you see it.' It's astonishing. We go to away meets and people are just flabbergasted at how he's able to do it."
Scholz gained his American citizenship in December, and he has already set nearly a dozen American records in the S-11 category, for athletes who are completely blind. Though he's one of 70 swimmers competing for the Greyhounds, Scholz's best times still lag slightly behind the pace of his sighted competitors. For example, at last week's season-ending meet, Scholz set an S-11 American record in the 200 butterfly. His time -- 2 minutes, 21.82 seconds -- was 18 seconds behind the race's winner but just 2 seconds behind the next-closest finisher.
Just because he has posted some of the best U.S. times doesn't guarantee him a spot in Beijing. The Paralympic participants will be the ones who have the best chance at winning a medal, so how Scholz stacks up against world competition is key. The Paralympic Trials take place in Minneapolis in April, and Scholz has a legitimate shot in two events: the 400 freestyle, where he's ranked fifth in the world, and the 100 butterfly, where he's ranked seventh.
Back at Loyola, Scholz is one of the most recognizable students on campus, and Loeffler says the entire team has benefited from just being around Scholz every day at practice. "[We] spend so much time together, they very quickly learned I'm pretty much just another person," Scholz says. "I just happen to be blind."
Philip Scholz's mother always told him that things happen for a reason. She had to pause and think, though, when he asked her, "So then why did I turn blind?"
Still today it's a difficult question to answer, but the Scholzes think they know.
"Maybe it is, Philip, because you need to tell people something," his mother told him. "People might see you and think, 'Hey, maybe that problem that I thought was so big, isn't that big. Maybe I can find a solution to my own problems after all.'"
rick.maese@baltsun.com