For Stephen Mellor, each day he gets into the pool to practice or race, he’s fulfilling his dream.
“My dream was always [been] to come to America and swim at a university, especially,” Mellor said. “Me and my dad used to stay up at night sometimes talking about it.”
The redshirt sophomore on the men’s swimming and diving team, from Cheshire, England, said his ultimate goal is to compete in the Olympics. With all the success he’d seen U.S. swimmers, such as Michael Phelps, have in past Olympics, he said the path to doing well seemed simple to him.
“They’re the guys that I look up to to one day be as good as, hopefully,” Mellor said. “And the way I saw it was the only way I was ever going to do that is by coming over here and training in America.”
But there was a problem when he tried to make it happen. Mellor injured his shoulder shortly after his graduation from high school, something from which he said it took 4-6 months to recover. After recovering, he began to swim full time as an amateur. He even competed in the British nationals.
His performance there may have gained him some notoriety before he ended up at N.C. State, but it brought into play what coach Brooks Teal called a “technicality” in NCAA rules. The college sports governing body maintains that a student-athlete can’t be out of full-time education for a year before enrolling in college.
In his case, Mellor was forced to sit out last season and lose a year of eligibility — making him a redshirt sophomore this season even though he has yet to officially compete for the Wolfpack. State appealed for a special exception because of Mellor’s injury, but the NCAA denied the appeal.
Mellor said it was a tough season for him because of having to sit out.
“Last year was very frustrating at times,” Mellor said. “But every now and again, I got to do time trials.”
In those two time trials, Mellor twice set a new school record in the 200-yard backstroke. Knowing he wasn’t going to be able to compete at ACC championships, he said those time trials were his best chances to showcase what he could do.
“It was like my ACC final,” Mellor said. “I wasn’t going to get one, but that’s the way I looked at it.”
He said every time the team had a meet, he would work with assistant Christopher Woodard before the meet to practice hard enough to know he wasn’t missing anything. Another thing he said helped him get through was proving to himself in practice that he could swim faster than people in the team’s meets were swimming.
Mellor said both of those strategies boiled down to the same thing.
“My motto my whole life has pretty much been every single negative that happens with you, turn it around and make it into a positive,” Mellor said.
And so with that season of sitting out behind him and as he enters this season as a sophomore captain for the team, things have changed for Mellor. Instead of being the one on the outside looking in, he will be one of the swimmers the team counts on the most. And Teal said he doesn’t think the year away from competing will hurt Mellor’s ability to succeed this season.”I don’t think it hurt him in any way,” Teal said. “It just makes him that much more hungry.”
Junior Jack Roney said he introduced Mellor to some of his new teammates last season. Roney said the fact that the redshirt sophomore is already a captain says a lot about him.
“That rarely happens, especially with the way Brooks likes to coach,” Roney said. “He [Teal] likes older leadership, and he’s a sophomore.”
Meanwhile, with the departure of senior Cullen Jones, who won the national championship in the 50-yard freestyle last season, the team will have to find ways to make up for the points he scored. Mellor said he doesn’t expect to step in and have the same kind of results immediately, but that he wants to end up being the team’s go-to swimmer.
“I’m going to need a little bit of time, but within the next 12 months, I expect to be that sort of person for the team,” Mellor said. “I expect to be the guy that this team, if they’re ever having a bad competition, that I get in the water and turn it around for us.”
But as he swims for the Pack this season, aiming for his goals of winning an ACC championship and doing well at NCAAs, he will still keep an eye towards his ultimate goal. That goal is reaching the Olympics — in 2008 if possible, but if not that year, then in 2012 in his home country.
“If it doesn’t happen then, I hopefully want to put myself in a position where I’m close and then maybe continue to 2012 when it’s in London,” Mellor said. “And that would be great to swim in London.”
