Gig Harbor’s Nagata impressing in freshman season with Tides swim team

Freshman Ryan Nagata is keeping himself quite busy. While others have split their time, Nagata has been competing in both club and high school swim nearly simultaneously. All of this hard work paid off in the last meet before leagues. Against Capital, Nagata finished first in the 200 freestyle with a time of 1:58.21 and second in the 500 freestyle with a time of 5:26.55

Still, Nagata is hoping to continue improving.

“I think I could improve getting more stamina,” Nagata said. “I’m working harder during my kick sets. Just trying to improve my kicks.”

All of this is meant to drop his time by several seconds.

“In districts I want to go around a 1:50 or 1:52,” Nagata said. “My best time is like a 1:56.”

This commitment and recent times were something his high school coach Mike Kelly praised while still seeing the potential for him to do better.

“Not necessarily his best times, but he’s close to it,” Kelly said. “He’s been working hard all season. He’s kind of new to the high school form of swim meets so he’s adjusting to it really well. He comes with a competitive spirit to each practice and performs at the highest possible level.”

That praise goes both ways as Nagata sees the value of doing both club and high school as each coach provides him with something different.

“It’ll be better in the long run because coach Mike is a good coach for certain things and my club coach is a good coach for other things,” Nagata said.

Even as he does both, he has shifted most of his current focus to high school to finish out the season after which he’ll swap back.

“His club participation is pretty much nil right now and once he’s done with the high school season he’ll be continuing on with his club,” Kelly said.

Still, at the beginning of the season he was effectively creating two a day workouts for himself which was different than what other swimmers, like teammate Billy Oates, do which is to focus solely on one.

“At the beginning of the season, my club practice was at 5:30 and the pool was 15 minutes away from the high school,” Nagata said. “So I’d hop out right after high school and run to the car then go to club practice.”

Even with that grueling schedule he created for himself, that didn’t stop him from showing up and putting in the work to continue to grow as a swimmer.

“He always shows up to each practice ready to work hard and give his best effort. That’s the same when you get to the competitions. He’s always very self analyzing and determined to improve himself with each race,” Kelly said.

Kelly continued to praise his openness to learning and identified what he is looking to improve with the young swimmer.

“We talk about his racing technique and he seems to be a quick learner,” Kelly said. “We’re still trying to lengthen his stroke along each stroke of the freestyle. He tends to start a little quicker on the stroke and we’re trying to get him to extend that distance.”

What type of drills are they doing to help him improve this?

“We do a set called long stroke distance where they’re actually counting their strokes per length and they try to minimize the amount of strokes needed to cover that distance,” Kelly said. “Besides lengthening his stroke, we’re also working on more distance on the push off from the walls, better streamline, and underwater dolphin techniques. That minimizes your strokes as well.”

All of this hard work is something Nagata hopes will pay off with a state berth. “With all the work I put in I want to be able to go to state for an individual event,” Nagata said. “I’m hoping to make it in the 500 freestyle and possibly the 200 freestyle.”

That desire to succeed also extended to the team at large.

“I do not know how the other teams are going to go at state but I feel like we can do pretty good,” Nagata said. “At least top 16. Somewhere between 16th and 10th.”

This story was originally published January 30, 2020 at 6:00 AM.