It wasn’t until his junior year at Franklin that Michael Couet seriously entertained the idea of swimming in college, and he went into his senior year without any real offers to do so.
He wound up spending the past year sharing lanes with some of the best swimmers in the world at the University of Texas, which has won 14 NCAA championships and was the runner-up this past season.
Next June, he’ll be on an even bigger stage. Couet recently qualified to swim the 100- and 200-meter breaststroke at the 2020 U.S. Olympic Team Trials, which will be held in Omaha, Nebraska.
"I never really thought back then I would be doing this," Couet said. "But once I finally committed I started to see the road ahead of me a little."
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Couet will be joined by at least one other former Grizzly Cub — 2019 graduate Carla Gildersleeve, now a freshman at Indiana, made the cut in the 200 butterfly. Jacob Destrampe, also starting his first year at IU, and current Franklin junior Cade Oliver are trying to make the cut this week at the Speedo Junior National Championships.
USA Swimming anticipates approximately 1,400 swimmers nationwide will end up competing at the eight-day event, which is perhaps the most prestigious swim meet in the world outside of the Olympics.
"Other than the select few who have an opportunity to represent Team USA in … the Pan Ams or the Olympics, this is basically the premier meet or the pinnacle meet," Franklin coach Zach DeWitt said. "To my knowledge, it’s probably the only one that can sell out a 15,000-seat arena."
Couet earned his trials berths last month at the Speedo Sectionals in Austin. He finished second in the 200 breaststroke with a time of 2:17.36, just inside the USA Swimming standard of 2:17.89, and added a 1:02.75 in the 100 breast, beating the qualifying mark of 1:03.29.
The following weekend, it was Gildersleeve’s turn. The 2019 Franklin grad went a lifetime-best 2:13.62 in the 200 fly final at the Indiana Swimming Senior Long Course Championships, coming in nearly a full second under the qualifying standard of 2:14.59.
Gildersleeve said that trying to land a spot in the trials wasn’t at the front of her mind going into that meet; her previous best time in the 200 fly was 2:16.7. But when she swam a 2:14.63 in the preliminaries — just four hundredths of a second away from the standard — her outlook changed a bit.
"Right after I saw that I was like, ‘Oh, I can get this done this weekend,’" Gildersleeve said.
Though the real payoff, the trip to Omaha, is almost a full year away, Gildersleeve can take the confidence she gained from getting into the trials and use it to propel her through her first season at Indiana University.
"Coming into IU, I was feeling like I shouldn’t even be on the team," she said. "Going into the (state long course) meet and having the meet that I did … just to see everything come together coming into my freshman year, what I’m doing in practice, it’s going to be worth it."
Gildersleeve also appreciates the fact that she’s the first female swimmer in Franklin history to qualify for the Olympic trials, one of many firsts she achieved during her time there.
She’s hopeful that the achievement will resonate with the younger swimmers in the program.
"That’s one of the highest things you can do," Gildersleeve said. "Just being able to show the girls and guys at (Franklin Regional Swim Team) that … this is possible if you put in the work."
For Couet, it’s the latest accomplishment during a meteoric rise over the past two-plus years.
After finishing 14th in the 100-yard breaststroke at the state meet as a high school junior, Couet was second in the event his senior season, shaving more than three and a half seconds off of his time in the process.
That massive improvement over one year allowed him to go from hardly being recruited at all, to landing at perhaps the top men’s swimming program in America.Â
"The cool thing about Michael is that he’s never met a challenge that he wasn’t interested in tackling," DeWitt said. "He’s never asked himself, ‘I wonder if I can do this?’ He just assumes anything is possible."
The next challenge Couet has laid out for himself is to make the cut for this season’s NCAA Championships, which will be held in Indianapolis. The sophomore is confident that by the time the Olympic trials roll around next summer, he’ll be ready to make a good showing there as well.
"Obviously I’m on a team with a lot of experience sending people there," Couet said of the Longhorns. "I think I’ll have a lot of good advice going into it."
Adam Destrampe became the first Franklin representative at the Olympic trials when he qualified in the 400 freestyle in 2016. Having multiple swimmers going in 2020 only serves to reinforce to the younger swimmers here that nothing is beyond their reach.
"My role is a coach is to build a program that gives kids the ability to dream big dreams, and so it’s really cool to see it come to fruition," DeWitt said. "When kids see that, they don’t have to ask themselves, ‘I wonder if it’s possible,’ or, ‘Can I do that?’ It’s really easy; they can look up on the walls or in the rafters or in our team room and they can see the same things that those two have already seen.
"So that’s a really special thing, to give kids the ability to dream that anything is possible here. Not many programs can do that."
