Mason, Hurricanes Open Season Friday at Home
by: Camron Ghorbi
HurricaneSports.com
CORAL GABLES, Fla. — It’s not often true freshmen make the leap from high school to collegiate swimming and find instant success.
Balancing classes, early-morning workouts and the heavy uptick in competition can take its toll over the course of a seven-month season.
But managing that transition while cracking the “top-10” times list in program history in six different events by year’s end?
That’s a whole different story altogether.
Ask head swimming coach Andy Kershaw, and sophomore standout Zorry Mason is in rarified air.
“We expected her to be great and do well, but didn’t expect everything we got,” Kershaw said. “A lot of times when you have someone capable of doing everything she did as a freshman, you see that coming ahead of time – we did not see that coming.”
Mason, who set the school mark in the 200-yard IM and was a member of a relay that did the same in the 200-yard freestyle, agreed with her head coach’s assessment.
“I didn’t expect to break school records or anything like that,” she said. “At the same time, there was some disappointment at the end because I wanted to go to NCAAs, and didn’t. That fuels me for this season – to train even harder. It makes me look at the dual meets differently, and shapes how I need to approach every practice and meet to reach that goal from last year.”
When Mason and the Hurricanes take to the water Friday to open their season against Florida (3 p.m.) at the Whitten University Center Pool, Kershaw hopes to see the plan of his star pupil and teammates in action.
“I’m very excited,” Mason said. “I haven’t raced short-course since February, but the last time in general was in August, so it has been at least a month. It’s very exciting. It’s also kind of nerve-wracking to open at home, because we want to have a breakout meet and show everybody what The U has to offer. It comes with nerves, but I’m more excited than anything.”
Kershaw said that during a recent practice, he needed to take a quick break to remind his freshman class about what it takes to compete at The U.
“I had to remind them that, if they warm up like that, this is going to be just another place,” he said. “That’s not what this is. This is a special place. We had to remind them that they swim at The U. You have a ‘U’ on your caps, on your suits, and we have to make that mean something – reminding them that a meet here is unlike anywhere else maybe in the world.
“We have that south Florida flair to it – the pool, the environment, the atmosphere – we have to embrace that. We have to be something different than just another team in any other pool.”
The Whitten Pool, where the Hurricane swimmers will meet the Gators Friday to open their seventh season under Kershaw and 31st under diving coach Randy Ableman, is far, far away from Mason’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky.
But, much like her preparation for meet day, her decision to attend Miami was calculated.
“I felt that I needed a change and that Andy would provide what I wanted and what I needed – not only from a training standpoint, but from a coaching standpoint and being very close with his swimmers, because the team is so small,” Mason said. “Getting away from home made me feel more confident to be on my own and being able to know that if something were to go wrong, that I would handle it myself.”
Luckily for Kershaw and the Hurricanes, not much went wrong for Mason during her freshman season.
Her time of 1:58.92 last November marked a school record – three months into her first year as a collegiate student-athlete. Mason and three teammates combined for the school mark in the 200 free relay at the 2019 ACC Swimming & Diving Championships in Greensboro, N.C., to cap an exciting first year.
She also contributed top-10 times in the 100-yard breaststroke (second-best at Miami), 100-yard butterfly (fifth) and 100-yard freestyle (eighth) – just to name a few.
“When you have a freshman year like that, it’s hard coming back and repeating that in the second year,” Kershaw said. “You start to think, ‘It all works.’ Sometimes you can forget that it all works because you put in so much hard work. You have to get right back to that.
“That’s the biggest challenge not just for her – she’ll handle any task we put before her – but for us as coaches to remember that all of that success was based on a lot of hard work, both at her club team and here.”
Mason is excited to see it all unfold beginning Friday, and has approached the season with a slightly different mindset.
“Everybody has key roles that they play on this team,” she said. “I do see myself as more in a leadership role, because I have that experience that I didn’t last year. In college, different than at the club level, it’s a team sport much more than it is individual. I guess it’s more looking at it like, ‘What can I do more for my team?'”
Regardless of the answer, the question sounds like a good start to a sophomore year encore.
