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After break, Brady chooses Cincy
Canfield senior nearly quit sport
By Joe Scalzo
After a disappointing finish to his high school career (by his standards), Canfield senior Connor Brady thought he was done with swimming.
“Honestly, I kind of gave up on swimming,” said Brady, who was leaning toward attending Kent State, which doesn’t have a swim team. “Things just didn’t seem to be working out. School was in the way and I felt like I had better things to do. It was kind of a dark point. I came home and slept and I didn’t worry about practice.”
By the three-week mark, he discovered something.
“It just made things way worse,” he said. “I realized I needed swimming in my life to make sure I didn’t go crazy.”
On Thursday, the two-time Vindicator boys swimmer of the year signed a national letter-of-intent to swim at Cincinnati, a school big enough to challenge him in the water but not too big to swallow him up.
“Cincinnati is a Division I school, which is what I wanted from the beginning,” said Brady, who plans to major in business and entrepreneurship. “It’s small enough that I won’t be on their ‘F’ relay like Ohio State and I’ll get a lot more individual attention.”
Brady didn’t decide to attend Cincinnati until the first week of May, three days before the deadline. One of the deciding factors came when he recently visited his girlfriend at Miami (Ohio).
“She’s native American and she was part of a special class, so she already had a friend group there,” said Brady, who also credited his friend Tom Mihalopoulos with encouraging him to keep swimming. “It’s a very similar concept with swimming. I needed some kind of group in my life, to keep me out of trouble and be there for me.”
Brady will graduate as one of the most decorated swimmers in Canfield history, advancing to the state meet all four years and finishing with three silver medals: the 100-yard butterfly and the 200 freestyle relay in 2014 and the 200 free relay in 2013.
But he placed fourth in the 100 fly at this year’s state meet — he was hoping to finish in the top two — swimming nearly a half-second slower than he did in 2014.
“I definitely did not want to leave [swimming] with Connor Brady not going out with his fastest time his senior year at state,” said Brady, who did swim a personal-best in the 100 backstroke at the state meet to finish fourth. “And my parents told me they wanted to see what I could do with at least one more year of training.”
They’re not the only ones.
“It’s been a huge weight lifted off my shoulders, that’s for sure,” he said of his decision. “It was rough for a couple weeks, but since I decided, it’s made life a lot easier.”