Ben Hewitt, a Center Grove graduate, recently led Nova Southeastern University to its second straight NCAA Division II national championship in women’s swimming.
Submitted photo | Joe Hausman
Getting to the mountaintop is difficult. Staying there is even harder.
Ben Hewitt can now say so with authority, because he’s done both.
The Center Grove graduate just ended his eighth season as the head swimming coach at Nova Southeastern University, an NCAA Division II school in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, by leading the women’s team to a second consecutive national championship last month in Geneva, Ohio.
The Sharks outpointed runner-up Colorado Mesa, 487 to 461.5, to defend their title; Nova Southeastern’s men placed eighth.
“Last year, I think I would tell you that we were expected to win,” Hewitt said. “This year, we had a chance to repeat; there were some teams that I think maybe were a little bit stronger throughout the season. But we stick to our principles, and we know the type of team that we have and we know the kind of work that we put in, and it’s just a matter of getting hot and swimming fast at the right time and getting everyone to kind of buy into that. Because there are times when that’s not possible, or people don’t always buy into it — and you’re never going to get it right, but we’ve come pretty close, and (NCAAs) was an example of that.”
Hewitt’s first title came a year ago at the IU Natatorium in Indianapolis, which allowed him to bring his team back to his home turf. It was a full-circle moment of sorts for the former Trojan swimmer, who got his coaching career started as a graduate assistant at his alma mater, Wabash College, after earning his degree in 2005. He then took an assistant position at Kenyon College in Ohio, where he helped win NCAA Division III men’s and women’s titles in 2007, before taking some time away from the sport.
“Kenyon was an awesome experience,” Hewitt recalled, “but my heart was pretty torn about wanting to continue in the sport, and just trying to see if I could live some life.”
After spending some time in California working in the San Francisco Giants ticket office as well as with some nonprofit organizations, Hewitt caught the coaching bug again. He describes himself as an avid sports fan, and says that “ultimately, you just sort of miss being on the inside of things.”
Hewitt returned to Wabash again as an assistant in 2009, just in time to coach his youngest brother Pete; he had previously been teammates with another younger sibling, Michael, during his time as a Little Giant swimmer. By chance, that 2009-10 season saw Wabash take a training trip to Nova Southeastern, which was planning to start up a swim program the following year — and he wound up being hired as an assistant for that first season under Hollie Bonewit-Cron, the only other head coach the Sharks have ever had.
In 2013, Hewitt came back to Indiana to take the head coaching job at DePauw — “a great place to establish myself as a head coach and be close to family,” he said — but when Bonewit-Cron stepped down three years later and recommended Hewitt as her successor at NSU, he jumped at the chance to return to the sunshine.
And he hasn’t regretted it for a minute.
“Life is good in south Florida,” Hewitt said. “It always has been. I have such great fond memories of this experience from the very beginning, and I think part of it is just being here from the ground up in 2010. … I am, I think in some regards, the thread here between past and present, because I was an assistant then and took some time away and came back. I know our alumni, and I know the kids that have left the program and gone on and done other things.”
Before even claiming that first NCAA title, Hewitt did enough in his first four seasons at NSU to be named the Sunshine State Conference’s Coach of the Decade, winning multiple league titles and helping the men’s and women’s teams to their best-ever NCAA finishes at the time (third in 2017 and 2018, respectively).
The ultimate successes of the last two years, Hewitt says, took root coming out of the COVID pandemic. The 2020 NCAA meet was canceled midway through, and a Sharks team that “was swimming fast up to that point” didn’t really get to see how it stacked up against the rest of the country. As pools opened back up later in 2020 and into 2021, Hewitt made it a point to sell his grand vision to the university for what he wanted his program to be over the long haul.
“We came out of COVID and really took that time to evaluate our strengths and weaknesses,” he said, “and there were some real hard conversations to have with our administrators about who we were and how we wanted to accomplish things.”
Needless to say, it’s worked out pretty well.
The women’s championships these last two seasons have been noticed by some larger schools, but Hewitt isn’t in a hurry to leave for a “bigger” job. Nova Southeastern, he says, has provided all of the support that he needs for his teams to succeed, and he feels like he’s in the big time already.
“You’re always flattered by a call from someone else,” he said. “(But) being able to contend for national championships is second to none in my mind, and I think that that’s a huge selling point, because at the Division I level there is such a hard process in place to get to the top of that mountain.”
Hewitt might not have been completely sure about his future as a coach 15 or 20 years ago, but his success isn’t a big surprise to those who knew him at Center Grove.
Classmate and teammate Amy Spencer — whose father, Jim Todd, was the Trojans’ coach at the time — remembers Hewitt as someone who was always well-versed in times and stats before they were readily available on a smartphone. When they traveled for club meets, she said, Hewitt and Todd would often get into long conversations about swimming. So Hewitt eventually choosing the road that he did makes a lot of sense in hindsight.
“It doesn’t surprise me,” Spencer said. “I didn’t see him taking this path, but it doesn’t surprise me — and it doesn’t surprise me that he’s good at it, just because he was always … really good about the numbers and the stats and the training stuff.”
Hewitt admits that coaching was always a possible career path for him because of his fascination with sports in general, but while he admired Todd’s passion while he swam for him at Center Grove and “learned a lot from” him during that time, he didn’t foresee landing where he is now.
“I don’t think I ever thought to myself, ‘I’m going to go get a college job and win a national championship,’” Hewitt said. “I never thought that that was going to be a thing.”
It’s a thing.
