Champion’s Mojo Podcast: Coleman Stewart Seeking to Take the Next Step
A two-time NCAA champion and member of the ISL winning Cali Condors, Coleman Stewart knows what it takes to compete at the highest of levels. Coleman joins the Champion’s Mojo podcast to talk about how important routines and support can be in making a great swimmer.
Below is an abridged Q&A of the interview, conducted by Kelly Palace and Maria Parker, with Coleman Stewart. You can listen to the full podcast episode #94 at https://championsmojo.com or by clicking here.
Champion’s Mojo: Tell us about your amazing ability to swim so fast underwater.
Coleman Stewart: I have to give all the credit to my coach, Braden Holloway, and the training style that we do at NC State. It’s just so focused on underwater driven swimming. All the training is really, really centered around underwater swimming. Braden just really knows how to get the most out of those crucial 15 meters.
Champion’s Mojo: What are a few things someone can do during the underwater part of the race to make them better?
Coleman Stewart: I really just try to think about making sure the technique is correct. Pressing with the chest first and then the rest of the body kind of follows like a whip after that. Everyone thinks it’s mainly leg driven, which legs obviously play a huge part, but the movement starts and initiates with the core and the chest and the rest of the body just kind of follows. That’s kind of the biggest thing that I think about, especially going into the last turn of the 100 back knowing that my legs are going to die. I try to really think about focusing on the chest and core and then worry about the legs when I get there.
Champion’s Mojo: Tell us about the ISL bubble and how the season went.
Coleman Stewart: It was one of the most fun times I’ve had around swimming. Being around all those huge names like Caeleb Dressel, Kelsi Dalia, Lily King, all of the Olympians from Team USA and other countries, it was just really eye opening. I learned a lot. Everyone was so nice and willing to help teach and help guide all the rookies who were there.
Champion’s Mojo: What did you need help with?
Photo Courtesy: Coleman Stewart (@cstew180)
Coleman Stewart: Definitely learning how to swim short course meters because it’s a lot different than long course meters and a lot different than short course yards. Caeleb was definitely one of the biggest guys to just kind of help me out. He was just super goofy, which I really like. I’m not a serious person. He was just kind of like cracking jokes when we were getting ready for the relays and stuff that was super nice. Olivia Smoliga was always, always there to help anyone. She asked me a few questions about underwater, which was really cool since she’s known for her underwater. Overall, it was a really, really long six weeks to be away from home for that long. Racing six times in six weeks was really, really tough. My body is hurting a little bit, but it’s definitely worth it. The Condors came away with the win, which was our goal the whole time. We definitely wanted to win the whole thing. I think we did it through the cohesion of the team. It was really, really natural and organic. We never really had to have any team meetings where we had to do icebreakers or anything. Everybody just clicked and got along really well. It was just a lot of fun and I’m so glad I was able to be a part of it.
Champion’s Mojo: Can you tell us one story from your time there?
Coleman Stewart: I mean, there’s so many and being there for six weeks, it’s hard to pin down just one. Before the final session of the final, I was dying to meet our general manager, Jason Lezak. It was just really, really cool when he had called me to ask me to be on the team. Right before the final meet, he was giving us a little pop up speech, which he doesn’t normally do. It’s a little out of character for him, but he was just going through his story and hearing that and being a part of the team was really cool. His project of making the Condors into a championship team was so cool and something I’ll always be grateful for.
Champion’s Mojo: After the season, are those teammates more like brothers and sisters now?
Coleman Stewart: Definitely. We’re always there for each other whether we had a bad swim or a good swim. Before the first meet Caeleb Dressel said there ain’t no crying in swimming. He told us that good swim or bad swim, you had three minutes to get over it. I think that helped a lot.
Champion’s Mojo: What is it like to now be a pro swimmer?
Coleman Stewart: It was a little bit different because usually our pro team trains with the college team, but that wasn’t able to happen because of the pandemic. We weren’t able to do that for the entire summer. We were able to find a little bit of pool space in a local pool thanks to the Raleigh Swim Association. That was a little different. I wasn’t able to swim with most of the guys that I had swum with before. I think there was maybe 10 of us, along with a handful of coaches. The focus was much more on us, which was nice. I still want to compete for NC State, even though I’m not directly affiliated with them anymore. They’ll always have a huge part of me and I hope that I can just keep bringing a good name to NC State and the PBG and the diamond and everything that the team swims for and just the school in general. Even though I’m competing as a pro for myself, there’s still a lot more behind the scenes. Everyday that I’m training, I’m thinking if I’m making NC State and the alumni proud. I’m really just trying to build a name for NC State and the Wolfpack Elite team.
Champion’s Mojo: What is it like to train with fellow top backstrokerr, Katharine Berkoff, at NC State?
Photo Courtesy: Peter H. Bick
Coleman Stewart: She is just so much fun to train with. I met her for the first time when we went to Naples for the World University Games in 2018. She was like, really goofy then. She still is really goofy. I think we got along really well in training because we’re both pretty similar minded where we obviously want to go faster than we need to in training. If we’re not going fast, then we get upset with ourselves and sometimes we can get on our own heads. For the most part, we kind of just make fun of each other. I think that really helps. It takes a lot of pressure off of needing to swim fast. I want to swim fast because it’s more fun. She was a lot of fun to train with because she’s loud and goofy in the nicest way. Braden has a lot of good backstrokers, and having Katharine in that group is really, really cool.
Champion’s Mojo: Obviously you just keep getting better in the pool and now, all of a sudden, you’re an important international swimmer. Did anything change for you? Is there anything in the last few years that’s helped you get to where you are?
Coleman Stewart: I don’t know if it’s something that’s just one singular thing, but I think the biggest thing that has helped me in the last four years is having Braden as my coach. He’s been so much help in and out of the pool for me. If I have a bad workout, he’s pretty good at being able to shut it off outside of the pool and still talking to me and figuring out why it was bad, because, you know, for the most part, he knows that I’m not just going to give up. There has to be something else going on. I think having Braden as that mentor and coach and just kind of like a leader has been really, really good for me and in the past year after finishing second and not defending my title. I was in a pretty rough mental state and Braden and my girlfriend and my family, they were all there to help bring me back up. That’s one thing that changed my mindset after not winning the 100 back again. I kind of touched on it earlier, with Katherine, where I just like to have fun in swimming. That’s kind of what really shifted it for me from 2018 to 2019. I never thought about losing. I always thought I was going to win. When I touched and I saw second, it was just gut wrenching. I did not handle it well. I didn’t handle it correctly. My senior year, I really shifted and just really tried to focus on having fun, even if I was swimming horribly slow in practice. I still tried to smile and it wasn’t like a forced smile, like I tried to actually have fun in practice. Braden and one of our volunteer assistants, Travis Morrin, definitely helped with that.
Champion’s Mojo: How did you handle the 2020 NCAA Championships being canceled?
Coleman Stewart: Similar to 2019, it was just the support system. When Braden had to tell us, he was miserable. He obviously didn’t enjoy doing that. He puts just as much into this sport on this team as we do, if not more. Every year the men’s team goes to Braden’s house for dinner. We just kind of sit and have a good time, and once NCAAs was canceled, he still had us over at his house and we were all cracking jokes and, obviously everyone’s a little upset, but we were all there for each other. The men’s team was there for the women as well, because they were going to have a killer NCAA meet this year. It was the cohesion of the men’s and women’s teams that really helped us get through it.
Champion’s Mojo: How do relationships in your life help or intersect with your swimming?
Photo Courtesy: NC State Athletics
Coleman Stewart: My girlfriend is a senior on the team this year, so she’s obviously around swimming and is very invested in her swimming, in my swimming, and the team in general. It’s interesting when we go to a meet and one of us will swim well and the other may not, so it’s a balance of making someone feel better. She’s always there for me. I like to think I’m always there for her. Hopefully she feels the same. She’s been a really good support system for the past few years. My dad was my coach for a long time when I was younger. That wasn’t great back then. I wanted to quit when I was 13, but he wouldn’t let me. That was an interesting dynamic. He still tries to coach me a little bit. My favorite thing that he does is sometimes he’ll text me after a race and I’ll just respond with, “Oh yeah, that’s what Braden said.” My mom doesn’t know a whole lot about competitive swimming. She was a professional triathlete, but she didn’t really know about swimming. She did a lot of open water stuff. But yeah, she never really did pool swimming. She did a lot of open water stuff. She doesn’t watch the start of my races because she’s afraid I’m going to false start or go past the 15 meter mark off the start. She doesn’t watch the turns because she’s afraid I’m going to mess up. It’s just like when I watch a scary movie. She’s funny. She’s always, always there. I think maybe she missed two or three minutes of my whole college career.
Champion’s Mojo: Besides having good support, what characteristics or qualities do you think help make you a Champion?
Coleman Stewart: I hate losing. I think that comes from my family because I’m the youngest of four and we are all very competitive. We all hate losing. Board games were very interesting growing up. I always want to get my hand on the wall first and that really drives me in practice. I feel like most people say that they’re super serious, but like I said, I’m super goofy. I think that helps me a lot. I hate losing, but I try to brush it off if I can and just try to have as much fun as possible. I don’t swim because it’s a big money sport. I do it because I really enjoy swimming. I like getting up and going to practice every day. It’s not something where I wake up and, I have to drag my butt to practice. I really do enjoy going to practice. I don’t know if it’s the pain or being around people that make me smile. Just having fun with it is something I try to do better than everybody else.
Champion’s Mojo: What routines or rituals do you do that help you perform better?
Coleman Stewart: Going to bed early. My girlfriend likes to go to bed pretty late, but going into a big meet I like to be in bed by 8:30 at the latest. I need to get my sleep. I think that’s something that I do that’s probably a little bit different. Something that I cut down on a lot is fast food. I think that’s something that I did that helped me do a lot better this year. Fixing small things like that. My mindset is that all the little things add up. Whether it’s eating something that I shouldn’t or not going all out on a 50 all out, I think even if it’s like ninety nine percent, there’s still that one percent that I could be doing better.
Champion’s Mojo: What has been the biggest obstacle in your life so far?
Photo Courtesy: Sarah D. Davis/theACC.com
Coleman Stewart: I think the biggest one was my sophomore year in August. I got a hernia and so I had to have surgery and I was out of the water and away from the team for what ended up being around two months. My first full week of practice was in mid-October. When someone tells you you need to have surgery and it’s in my core area, being an underwater swimmer, it was kind of like, oh my gosh, this is not good. It just speaks to the support that Braden gave me. He was there 100 percent. I remember talking to him. He was in Taipei for the World University Games when I learned about it. His first thing was like, we’ll come up with a plan and we’ll get you back. There was no hesitation or worry that it wasn’t going to be a great season whereas, in my mind, I didn’t know how I was going to catch up to everybody. We’ve talked about it a lot. Braden especially thinks that that’s really where my mindset pivoted, because when I did get back, it was full panic. I was two months behind. I need to catch up to everyone as soon as possible if I want any chance of doing anything this season. That was probably one of the best training. That was something that if you had told me that earlier that year, I just wouldn’t have believed you. It was really just Braden helping me overcome that mentality and being there to make a plan.
Champion’s Mojo: What did you learn from that experience?
Coleman Stewart: Obviously it was a physical setback, but what it really taught me was that your mind can do so much more than what you think. Getting back in the pool, I could only do flutter kick and pull separately, so I had done very little aerobic stuff. One of the first workouts I was keeping up with everybody. I was like, I don’t really understand how this is working, because physically this shouldn’t be what I’m doing, but mentally I was like, I mean, you have no choice. This is what you’re doing. I think another thing similar to that is we have an underwater group workout, which is fully focused on underwater kicking and making sure you can hold your kicks for a whole race. I wasn’t able to do dolphin kicks yet, so I had to do the whole thing flutter kick. We do a lot of work with drag socks and dolphin kick with socks is a lot easier than doing flutter kick. I had to do flutter kick, but I was still keeping up with everyone else. I think it was just a big mental mental block that I was able to get over through having a hernia.
Champion’s Mojo: Do you write down your goals?
Coleman Stewart: I actually don’t. I think this is something that I do differently as well. I don’t write my goals down. I really don’t have goal times because I think that’s kind of what hurt me in 2019. I was so focused on winning and the end of the year. In the 100 back, I wanted to break the record. I didn’t achieve it. I didn’t beat myself up for it because I knew that I had what I could leading up to it. I don’t know, I just don’t write down my goals. I think I get in my head to much when I do that.
Champion’s Mojo: What do you have planned between now and the Olympic Trials?
Coleman Stewart: A lot of long course training. My underwater can help drive me in short course, but for long course I have to train a lot more of the swimming aspect. A lot of backstroke, butterfly, and freestyle long course training. The next big thing is Olympic Trials.
Champion’s Mojo: What do you think your best event for trials will be?
Coleman Stewart: I think the 100 free is pretty stacked. America is really good at that. America’s really good at backstroke, but that will probably be my best bet. My main goal is just to get on the National Team. That’s something I haven’t done yet.
Champion’s Mojo: What are you looking forward to, both in and out of the pool, for the next five or so years?
Coleman Stewart: I would say I am looking forward to the ISL again. I really hope that it’s able to take off. I think that is something that swimmers are going to really, really enjoy. Hopefully every year that’s something that I can look forward to. Out of the pool, I am very excited to be done with college. I still have one more semester left. Once I’m done with that, I can just fully focus on swimming and training and see where it goes from there.
Champion’s Mojo: Is there anything else we haven’t covered today you’d like to mention?
Coleman Stewart: I actually started my own swim camp called The Fifth Stroke Swim Camp. You can find out more about that on Instagram, Twitter, or fifthstrokeswimcamp.com
Champion’s Mojo: This has been great Coleman! We wish you all the best! Thank you!
Coleman Stewart: My pleasure! Thank you too! It was fun!