On a recent Saturday morning, at an elite competition in St. Petersburg, Florida that would turn out to be Mitchell Ledford’s ticket to the U.S. Olympic Trials, the sophomore at Sebastian River High School took his place on the block with four of the fastest swimmers in the world.
On his right was Ryan Lochte, winner of six gold medals. On his left was Caeleb Dressell, two-time gold medalist and holder of the world record in butterfly, Mitchell’s stroke. On the far side of Dressell was Joseph Schooling, who held a state record Ledford had his eye on.
Mitchell Ledford’s goal in St. Pete was to swim well enough to earn a trip to the Olympic Trials in Omaha in June, a goal thwarted last year by the lockdown.
When the swimmers hit the water, Mitchell’s drive to keep up with the Olympians flanking him was hard to curb. The short course race meant more turns, and more time underwater, and Mitchell had to portion out his energy all the way to the end.
“I started off the race really fast and I didn’t have much to finish the race with,” Mitchell said last week following practice in Sebastian. “I swam that race much different than I should have because they were next to me. But it was still awesome.”
If his power felt depleted, it was enough to get him to the wall ahead of Lochte and to break fellow swimmer Schooling’s own high school record.
That afternoon, Mitchell swam the 100-meter long – the only format at the Olympics – racing the length of a 50-meter pool, in longer laps with fewer turns. Swimming with his age group, some of the best young swimmers in the country, he came in second by 2/100s of a second. But his time – 53.79 seconds, qualified him for Olympic trials.
For his age, gender and stroke, butterfly, Mitchell Ledford now ranks third in the United States.
Today, weeks after the meet, his mind still reeling from those intense races, Mitchell feels his future shifting.
In his analytical, pragmatic way, he sees that his performance at the March races and at another meet in December have expanded his horizons. Where once his highest goal was to be recruited for a U.S. military academy – like his three brothers, all top swimmers at Sebastian – he now dreams of a berth on the U.S. Olympic swim team. If not this year, another year.
“I had my head set on the Air Force Academy,” he said last week, barely winded after a two-hour practice at the North County Aquatic Center.
“But then last year, I started going faster than I thought I would, and then I started beating my brothers’ times. And I started thinking about what I could possibly do with this in the future.”
Now, Mitchell is thinking of “just going to normal college and then seeing what I can do, if I can go further.”
On the block with the gold medalists in St. Petersburg, Mitchell stood out for his youth; Lochte is 36, the others in their mid-20s. But at his practice pool in Sebastian, alongside two dozen teenage swimmers, Mitchell is a standout for his speed, powering down his lane like something out of Sea World.
His current success is an astonishing turn of events for Mitchell, who just 15 months before was sidelined by a serious injury.
In January 2020, when his sights were already set on trials for the summer Olympics that ended up being canceled, Mitchell woke up with sudden, excruciating pain in his shoulder.
He and his parents were visiting his brother in Hawaii at the time and for the rest of the week-long vacation, the family was on the phone with doctors. Mitchell was despondent.
“I was really upset about it, really broken by it,” said Mitchell. “I wanted to keep training, but I knew I couldn’t.”
“Emotionally, Mitchell felt all his dreams were crashing down,” said his mother, Carrie Ledford. “He didn’t think he would recover.”
When X-rays pointed to tendinitis, doctors recommended physical therapy instead of surgery. That was good news, except that the soonest appointment for therapy was three weeks out.
Mitchell’s dad, Patrick Ledford, turned to the Internet and found Markell Lyng, a swim coach in Sugar Land, Texas. Lyng, who specializes in what is known as dryland training for swimmers, began working with Mitchell through video calls, allowing him in the water only to kick behind a kickboard.
Carrie Ledford was astounded at how fast her son improved. “It really was an incredible comeback,” she said.
Today, Lyng continues dryland training with Mitchell, who believes the training has improved his performance and helped prevent injuries.
“He’s done an excellent job working on the small details that made a huge difference,” said Lyng. “His bodyline, balance, coordination, power and endurance all have improved.”
By mid-March a year ago, when Mitchell was just getting back into swimming butterfly, the cascade of pandemic-related closures rippled through the county, shutting down the North County pool where he trains.
Desperate to keep swimming despite the lockdown, Mitchell turned to the ocean, driving to the beach from his home in Sebastian.
“He would have dog-paddled in the bathtub if he had to,” his mom said.
“These athletes were torn from their network of school and practice [by the pandemic],” she said. “For someone like Mitchell, there was almost a desperate search for how to stay in condition, not knowing how long it would last.
“There was also the fear of getting COVID, which attacks the respiratory system. Coupled with trying to recover from his injury, he, like many kids, was very depleted emotionally.”
“For our swimmers, it was very foreign,” said Sebastian swim coach Scott Barlow. “It was very strange because swimmers in the state of Florida swim year-round. We only take small little breaks here and there, like a week in spring after their season, and maybe a week in the winter and a little bit at the end of the summer. But two months out of the water? None of my swimmers have ever taken that much time off.
“But in a strange twist,” Barlow went on, “I think the time out of the water really allowed a lot of swimmers to let their bodies grow and heal, not being under such stringent training and the regimens that they do. These are high-level athletes that swim nine or 10 times a week.”
When his swimmers came back in May and started training, they seemed to flourish, like plants sprouting new growth after a period of dormancy.
Barlow, who has coached swimming for 35 years, including a young Olympic gold medalist from Delray Beach, decided to hold a competition in August – one of the first meets in the state after lockdown.
“It was really a strange experience,” said Barlow. Because of COVID restrictions, there were no parents on the deck cheering. “But the kids swam out of their minds. They were just so amped up because they didn’t compete for so long. I had kids getting up on the block and swimming best times.”
There was also emotional improvement, Barlow said.
“Everybody was on a mental high. They were so happy to be back in the water, just getting into the pool, seeing their friends – that social aspect was taken away from them. And just getting back in a routine. I think they missed the routine more than anything else.”
Carrie Ledford understands the impulse. She and her husband Patrick both were swimmers, and their stroke, like that of all four of their sons, was butterfly.
The couple swam together in high school near Buffalo, N.Y., having met when Carrie was 10.
Today, Carrie and Patrick Ledford are both swim meet officials. She handles the starts, he keeps the times.
For this aquatic family, the decision to move to Florida was driven by swimming – not for Mitchell, who was only 4 and didn’t even know how to swim, but for their eldest son, Sean, the one they were visiting in Hawaii.
Sean, now a C-17 pilot and graduate of the Air Force Academy, was a talented butterflier. By age 14, he had already swept the three butterfly events at the Eastern Zone Competition that included swimmers from Maine to Virginia.
Sean had enough potential that his parents quit their jobs, sold their house, pulled four kids out of four schools, and headed to Florida where Sean could train all year. The coach they chose was Scott Barlow, who went on to coach all four Ledford boys.
In addition to swimming for his competition club, Treasure Coast Swimming, the Ledford crew also swam for Sebastian River High School, where Barlow has been head swim coach for the past decade.
Carrie quickly found a job in banking – she is a financial planner with Wells Fargo, though she admits she “works to support being a homemaker, my first job.”
Patrick Ledford, who worked for ATT in Buffalo, got a job at Cape Canaveral working on communications equipment. He gets up at 4 a.m. for the long commute from Sebastian. Carrie rises at 5 a.m. to get in a walk around the block, inspired by Mitchell, who gets up at the same time in order to make it to swim practice by 6 a.m.
Though Mitchell went back to bricks-and-mortar school last fall, he returned to learning from home this semester to better accommodate his swim schedule.
After the early-morning practice, he’ll have another two-hour practice at 3 p.m. In between, he’ll squeeze in a dryland workout, a couple of healthy meals, and a nap.
He also keeps up his coursework, which is rigorous – he is in Sebastian River’s IB program and has a weighted 4.397 GPA, ranked 13th in a class of 481. That academic accomplishment combined with his swimming times earned him the title of Scholastic All American.
Soon he’ll begin SAT prep – unless the Olympics get in the way. And that’s all “just a Tuesday” for Mitchell, as he likes to say.
COVID-19 has caused one more hitch in Mitchell’s life and Olympic plans.
The Olympic trials have been split in two this year to allow for social distancing. Mitchell’s time in the 100-meter long course in St. Pete qualified him for Wave 1, but was 42/100s of a second shy of qualifying for Wave 2, where the most serious contenders for this year’s Olympic team will compete.
In order for Mitchell to compete in Wave 2, he must finish in the top two in his Wave 1 race.
“That is not an impossibility,” said his mother. “He’s nothing short of shocking every time he swims.”
