USC's swimming and diving team jumped into the deep end of collegiate competition in 1922, 17 years before the university even had a pool on campus. Over the years, the team has developed a number of All Americans and even some Olympic competitors.
TRANSCRIPT
“You start back on the board and you have this thing we call a hurdle. It's your approach to the end of the board.”
That’s Sophie Verzyl, a diver on the swimming and diving team at the University of South Carolina and a member of the U.S. Diving Team who has her sights set on competing in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. She’s describing what’s called the Double Out Dive, one of her favorites.
Sophie Verzyl: “You do a couple steps and then drive your knee to kind of start bouncing the board, and then you take off forwards and you flip frontwards in a pike position, which is kind of where you're folded over holding your legs when they're straight. And you'll do about one and a half flips and you'll come out and snap your legs, and then you'll start twisting and you'll do that twice, and then you'll come around and see the water and then line up your entry and go head first.”
Sophie is among the 30 women and 20 men who comprised USC’s swimming and diving team in 2025. I’m Chris Horn for Remembering the Days, and today we’re taking a deep dive into the history of the team, which traces its roots all the way back to 1922.
Back then, Alex Waite was already a star on the Gamecock football, basketball and track teams when he lobbied to establish swimming and diving as a collegiate sport at Carolina. He and four other men were the only members of the inaugural team, which made a splash that first year by winning the state championship, competing against The Citadel and the College of Charleston.
USC was a bit of a late-comer to the sport of swimming and diving. Yale and Harvard started their teams in 1900 while Cornell, the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin established theirs in 1901.
What might have been holding USC back was the fact that the campus didn’t have a pool for swimming and diving. It wasn’t until 1939 that an indoor natatorium was built on the south end of what’s now Longstreet Theatre.
So, to practice, the Gamecock swimmers and divers team used the Pacific Community Pool, located in the now-historic Olympia Mill Village south of campus. The pool had been built in 1918 for families of workers in the Olympia and Granby cotton mills. That community very graciously allowed the USC team to swim and dive in its pool, which actually still exists. The old pool doesn’t hold water anymore, but it’s part of the event space at 701 Whaley Street. USC’s original natatorium doesn’t hold water anymore, either. It closed when the Blatt P.E. Center pool was built in the 1970s, and it now serves as a storage area for props used in Longstreet Theater.
If you flip through Garnet & Black yearbooks from the 1920s, you’ll see the men on the swimming-diving team dressed in modest, one-piece leotards. By the 1940s, they were wearing swimming briefs and, by the 1970s bikini-style suits. Women wore one-piece suits when they were finally allowed to compete at the varsity level in the 1970s.
Head swimming and diving coach Jeff Poppell says the style of suits swimmers wear has evolved and so has their training — all because of the need for speed.
Jeff Poppell: “Swimming just continues to get faster as a sport. I mean, we just came back from the national championships last week for the men, and women the week before, and the swimming that you're seeing now, you know, in 2025 is just — it's just mind blowing to be honest with you, you know, how much it's advanced from back 100 years ago even, what was considered fast then nowadays is just kind of I guess you would say more developmental. It's not advanced in any way. We always think that, oh, how can we get any faster? But it does. It's amazing.”
Nils Wich-Glasen was an All-American swimmer for USC from 2018 to 2022, and he’s now an assistant coach for the team.
Nils Wich-Glasen: “My personal best would not make it back into the B final anymore. So I was sixth and seventh my junior year in the 100 and 200 breaststroke, and I think those times would have been like 19th and 20th this year. So in such a short amount of time, that's a really significant performance increase, especially when you're talking about the top 20, not just the top three.”
Collegiate diving has seen its share of change in the past century, as well. Along with deploying much more acrobatic techniques, modern divers have much better diving boards than those used long ago.
Todd Sherritt: “It had to be, it was very basic. Based on the equipment they were going off of, they weren't going off these boards they make now with aluminum alloys and all the mixtures of metals and the holes in it. And it's designed to go down and come back quick. They're diving off just like bricks.”
That’s Todd Sherritt, who coached men’s and women’s diving for 28 years at Carolina before retiring in 2021. Decades ago he gave up a dream of becoming a real estate entrepreneur in Cincinnati to start a club-level diving team in Columbia, South Carolina. In 1993, he became the head diving coach at USC and had a remarkable career.
Todd Sherritt: “I had 56 All-Americans, 13 SEC champions. I had six Olympians. A lot of national championships, USA, coached a lot of world teams. Coached Olympic team's coach. Olympic team for South Africa, which was an honor. And then a lot of world championships. I've traveled to over 30 countries.”
When he was recruiting divers to USC in the 1990s and early 2000s, Sherritt had a special edge. He would take them around campus, show them the Olympic-sized pool at the Blatt P.E. Center where the team practices and competes, and then introduce them to the president of the university at the time, John Palms.
Todd Sherritt: “Palms was actually a diver himself. Yes, he was. So he would always come down and talk to the divers that I bring down there. I mean, it was the greatest recruiting thing in the world. Oh, here's the president. By the way, did you know I was a diver?”
I had no idea that President Palms had been a collegiate diver when he was a cadet at The Citadel in the 1950s. Makes me wonder if other past presidents at USC were student-athletes back in their day. We might have to explore that topic some time.
So, at the beginning of the episode you met Sophie Verzyl, a standout diver at USC who just earned a degree from the Moore School of Business and is about start on a master’s in sport management. She starts training next year for the 2028 Olympics, and Todd Sherritt, who recruited Sophie to USC, thinks she has a solid shot at Olympic glory.
Sammie Grant was a freestyle swimmer on the team from 2018 to 2022. She grew up in Maryland, going to the beach.
Sammie Grant: “I was terrified of the water. I couldn't go further than, like, my ankles, so I would get in and be scared. And my parents were like, come on. So they kind of were like, let's do lessons. So I started doing lessons when I was like 7 or 8. I hated them at first, but then, you know, I got more comfortable with the water and I was like, this is cool.”
Sammie did not go on to win fame and glory on the USC swimming and diving team, but she did earn a degree in sport management from USC, and that helped her land a job working for the university’s athletics department. She’s now the media specialist for USC’s Olympic sports teams — tennis and swimming and diving.
Sammie Grant: “With swimming, I feel like it gave me so many connections and taught me so many things that I feel like I'm still kind of using today.
“I think being so committed to something and like having to wake up early hours and dedicate that much of your life to a sport, again, I guess tying in the fact that I didn't even really have any stakes in it, I was just doing it because I liked it. That kind of helps translate to this industry specifically because we work long hours, we're working weekends. Your schedule is crazy. You don't really have a lot of time for, you know, social life when you're in season working, which was the exact same thing when I was swimming. So I think being used to like, a schedule like that really helped the transition into a job like this be like, OK, this is basically what I did for my whole life. Like, I'm fine working past five. I'm fine working weekends. I'm fine dedicating so much of my time to a job because that's basically what I was doing. And that made I think the transition easier.”
Every sport has its quirks, I suppose, and swimming and diving are no different. Todd Sherritt says divers are motivated in different ways, and as a coach, he had to figure out what made each person tick. He remembers one diver in particular.
Todd Sherritt: “The funny thing about her, she dived a little better if she was a little pissed off. So you had to find some way to get that accomplished, to get that animal to come out. And then, of course, then you get the other ones that, you know, you have to cut a joke or something. They got to be not even thinking about diving. Get them in another world. Everybody's so different. But you find out what works and what makes them tick.”
Swimmers tend to be very disciplined athletes, says Nils Wich-Glasen. They spend hours in the pool morning and evening nearly every day of the week, focused on getting faster. All that time in the water gives them a distinctive aura.
Nils Wich-Glasner: “We wear chlorine like it's our perfume, because the chlorine smell is very strong. When you spend upwards of 17 hours a week in the pool, between all the practices, it's hard to get rid of.”
Chlorine cologne — I love it!
Recent NCAA rules have cut the rosters for collegiate swimming and diving programs across the country, so competition is now especially keen for swimmers and divers coming out of high school. Keep an eye on USC’s program as it swims with the sharks in the highly competitive SEC and keep an eye out for Sophie Verzyl as she competes to make the U.S. Olympic team in 2028.
That’s all for this episode. On the next Remembering the Days, Evan Faulkenbury uncovers the history of USC’s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest and most prestigious honor society in the United States. It’s a story that includes a bit of historical intrigue when an Ivy League college blocked Carolina’s initial bid for membership.
That’s next on Remembering the Days.