
Every morning before the students in the Dustbowl Dorms awake for their morning drills, Tony Scoutage has already put in several hundred laps in at the 2Fort pool. Scoutage, originally a runner on the Dustbowl High's flag relay team, left the team this winter in order to begin training for the 2008 Olympics.
"I still like running and everything, but there's more to life than time trials and hoisting a flag on your back," Scoutage explained about his decision to switch sports. "I mean, when people look at me they say, 'Yeah, he looks like a sprinter,' and that's where the conversation stops. I want to be more than that. I want to do something that nobody in my class has tried yet."
Scoutage also points out the fact that swimming has more opportunities than competing for the relay team does. "First of all, the margin for error in relaying is tiny," Scoutage said. "It's like all of us runners are cut from the same mould. Everyone on the team runs the same speed, and I mean exactly the same speed. All that sets us apart is how well we use the bhop technique, and honestly the bhop made me a little nauseous."
Instead of spending the winter months practicing handoffs and running wind sprints, Scoutage looked for something different. "I was walking up Avanti hill when I saw that fountain and I knew I had to jump in it," Scoutage recalled of his first impulse to take up swimming. "It was amazing. If you've ever seen that fountain, you know it's not much, but I must have spent two hours swimming around in that thing. I knew from that point on that swimming was something that I could be very good at."
Although Scoutage may have found his calling, he still had to persuade his captain to approve his request to leave the team. "That was hard for me," Captain H. W. Guy remembered. "Tony was a big part of what we did last year. I can't tell you how many times he came through in the clutch and single-handedly carried our success on his back. I tried telling him that it would be better next year, but I think he was tired of the other teams' tactics and the beating he would get some weeks."
Scoutage understood the position he was putting Capt. Guy in, but he had a dream to follow. "I asked Capt. Guy to make a hard decision, and luckily it came out in my favor," Scoutage explained. "I wasn't happy on the team. I love everyone on it like they're family, but I wasn't happy. When he released me from my relay duties, I told him that if I reach my goal of getting to the Olympics it would be due in a large part to his training."
Soon after being cleared to begin his swimming conditioning, Scoutage ran into a new set of problems. "No self respecting swimmer would practice in the Avanti fountain, so I had to find a new place," Scoutage said. "You'd think the school would have its own pool, but it didn't at the time. I tried using the CZ2 canals, but I kept getting lost in them. Then I tried the Rock2 pool, but I was told that it was designed as a diving well and not a racing pool. After that I got radical and trekked over to the Mulch_faf creek. It turns out that the creek was too shallow for me."
Finally he came across what he saw as the most obvious solution. "I literally fell into the 2Fort pool one day as I was walking between the buildings," Scoutage said. "Once I found my practice spot, everything else was easy. And really, who uses the 2Fort water anyway. I rarely see anyone swimming in there more than a few seconds before they jump out."
Scoutage's routine calls for an early morning practice every morning, and an evening practice every other night. "I had to find a captain to make me go through with some of those two-a-days," Scoutage admitted. "I'd get in the pool and be so tired during those second practices that I knew I was running out of life."
In order to solicit a personal trainer, Scoutage hit the recruitment boards and started scouring the IRC network. "Finding Coach Snip (Carl Snipera) was almost harder than finding the practice pool," Scoutage recalled. "Really, who wants to coach a guy in an event there isn't an organized league for yet? Luckily, Coach was crazy enough to do it. He'd been stationed over seas for a while and lost connection to his old team a while back, so he was thrilled to have anyone recruit him."
Coach Snipera's bag of training methods holds some that could be seen as unorthodox. "Sure, I'm different than most of the guys out there," Coach Snipera admitted. "Not everyone is willing to put a charge into their player's back every once in a while. And not everyone is willing to force his player to stay under water until his life almost leaves him. But I make no apologies for the way I do things. I'm trying to coach a winner here, and four years might not be enough time to do it."
In order to assist Scoutage's efforts, the school constructed an indoor pool for him to practice in during the evenings. "They [the administration] really has my back," Scoutage said showing his appreciation for the new facility. "They brought a mapper in here a few weeks after I moved into the 2Fort pool, and he asked me what I needed. I told him I needed shallow but wide box with some water in it, and that a roof would be nice. Coach added that he needed a roost to spot me from. The next day, the mapper had it built."
Armed with a new facility, a headstrong coach, and a desire to compete, Scoutage still has his work cut out for him. Most Olympic swimmers start training in elementary school-not high school. While there are alternative techniques Scoutage and Snipera could use instead of their intense training regimen, neither of the two are willing to push the boundaries of the Rules Organization. "Sure, I could use that TimeRefesh stuff," Scoutage said of the exploit. "I wouldn't even need to practice if I was willing to do that, but that's why I left the relay team to begin with. I had enough of all of that special bhopping, chophopping, and TimeRefresh stuff. I want something where if you win, it's because you trained harder and better than everyone else. That's what swimming does for me."
If he does it well enough, it would not surprise Capt. Guy to see Scoutage in the 2008 Summer Olympics. "That kid can target a goal like a bot when he wants to. Sometimes I swear he doesn't need to eat or sleep between training sessions. He's that driven."