This feature originally appeared in the Summer edition of the Cal Sports Quarterly. The Cal Athletics flagship magazine features long-form sports journalism at its finest and provides in-depth coverage of the scholar-athlete experience in Berkeley. Printed copies are mailed four times a year to Bear Backers who give annually at the Bear Club level (currently $600 or more). For more information on how you can receive a printed version of the Cal Sports Quarterly at home, send an email to CalAthleticsFund@berkeley.edu or call (510) 642-2427.
Joining the McLean Marlin neighborhood pool team.
Dropping nearly 7 seconds in a calendar year to qualify for the Olympic Trials at age 15.
Deciding Cal's aquatics program was the best fit.
Breaking his arm skateboarding during sophomore year.
Those are pivotal moments in
Andrew Seliskar's swimming career, for sure, but they aren't THE pivotal moment.
That came after the skateboarding accident.
Seliskar was standing on the pool deck ahead of a big offseason meet in the summer of 2017, but he wasn't swimming. Instead, the then-sophomore was relegated to the deck after breaking his arm skateboarding a few weeks earlier.
He wasn't swimming, and he wasn't happy.
"I was a big recruit who didn't know if I wanted to keep swimming," Seliskar said. "It felt like a lot of effort and emotional energy into something that wasn't being returned to me."
Since he started swimming at age 6, he loved being in the water. Seliskar prided himself in his versatility and proficiency as a swimmer, and it had come easily to him. But during his first two seasons at Cal, Seliskar wasn't performing the way he had hoped in the pool or in the classroom. Just weeks before he broke his arm, he had claimed a silver medal in the 400 individual medley event at the NCAA Championships, but he was still torn up about Cal's second-place team finish and frustrated about the outcome of his other performances. Outside of the pool, Seliskar was struggling to stay engaged in his engineering classes.
"I wasn't swimming. I didn't like my classes. I was just upset in general. It wasn't what I had planned for. I had always just envisioned best-case scenarios," Seliskar said. "I had to get real with Dave and tell him how I was feeling."
As they stood there on the pool deck watching Cal's swimmers train, Seliskar confessed his lack of motivation and unhappiness to head coach Dave Durden.
Durden, who studied engineering in college at UC Irvine and took a job at Western Digital before switching his career to reflect his passion for swimming and coaching, offered some advice.
"Dave said something like, 'You get to a certain point of your life and you have to look around at what you're doing, and you have to pivot. You have to go and do something else.'" Seliskar explained. "That advice – just pivot – that's what I had to do."
Within three days of that conversation, Seliskar visited with his academic advisers and switched his major to environmental economics & policy. Then, with the advice of Durden, he took the whole summer off from swimming.
The summer break offered Seliskar time to reflect on his commitment as a swimmer and a student-athlete.
"I wasn't self-aware of what I was doing." Seliskar said. "I was good at swimming, and I loved swimming. That was what I did, but I wasn't doing it in the right way. I thought if you just try really hard, it would pay off."
For his first few years on campus, Seliskar would do things on his own out of the water that he believed would enhance his training, such as run up every staircase he came across to compete with himself. It was a good mindset to have, he believed, but his all-out attitude meant he wasn't taking the rest he needed to be fresh for practice, and he'd show up to the pool and swim slowly.
He also realized his longtime desire to be a versatile swimmer meant he wasn't committing himself fully to any particular area of his swimming career.
"I was versatile, but it was in the sense of hedging my bets," he said. "I was trying to stay good at every event in a sense to fall back in case I didn't do well on the one I was focusing on."
That summer was the turning point.
"It made me realize that maybe I wasn't applying myself in the right way," he said. "It was the idea of banging my head against the wall versus being smarter about how I was training and how I was recovering."
When he began his junior year, Seliskar was slightly out of shape from his summer break, forcing him to be patient with his development. He had goals to become more consistent, physically and emotionally, and to remain a versatile swimmer, but one that knew how to hone in on his versatility. He began to segment his training days, focusing on specific events, and also learned to compartmentalize his academic efforts so that if he had a hard test, it didn't also lead to a bad practice.
"It was learning how to be at the pool when I'm at the pool or be in class when I'm in class," he said. "That consistent attitude that got to a point where I kept training and I wasn't all over the place. I was consistently good every day. Every day I was coming in and hitting it, doing really well."
By the time the NCAA Championships rolled around, Seliskar turned in his best overall performance points-wise. He helped Cal's 800 free team set a school record and led the 400 free relay to third place. He finished top five in both the 200 IM and 400 IM and claimed silver in the 200 breaststroke.
Given his performance at NCAAs and key international meets coming up that summer, Seliskar knew that with his consistent training, he was primed for more success.
Then came the 2018 National Championships in Irvine.
Seliskar was already a staple of the 400 IM, but he also wanted to swim the 200 free event. The top four finishers in Irvine qualified for the Pan Pacific Championships, and the top six qualified for the 2019 World Championships. Leading up to the 200 free, he trained under the radar with support from Durden.
"I didn't want to get top 6 or top 4. I wanted to win it," Seliskar said.
He set a goal to swim the 200 free in 1:45.9. Instead, he went even faster – 1:45.7 – and won the event, qualifying for both Pan Pacs and Worlds.
"It was a dream. I was so pumped," Seliskar said.
At Pan Pacs, he helped Team USA win gold in the 200 relay, and he claimed an individual silver medal in the 200 free.
After a summer full of individual success, Seliskar had one more season with the Bears, and one more chance to help his squad secure its evasive team championship after finishing as the runner-up to Texas for each of his first three seasons at Cal.
"I was really afraid of getting complacent. I didn't want to be in a spot where I thought I was good, because that's where I was when I came in to Cal," he said. "I came straight back and doubled down and tried to get a lot better than where I was. It lit a fire. For me, I knew how to get better is by staying consistent. I wanted to make sure that when I hit the water every day for practice, I was ready to put my best performance out there."
He locked down nutritionally and made even more of an effort to take care of himself outside of the pool, spending more time in the training room, taking ice baths and avoiding injuries (which meant no more skateboarding).
Meet after meet of his senior season, Seliskar's consistency paid off, and by the Pac-12 Championships, he claimed his 11th career conference title – tying for most in history and solidifying his status as Cal's men's Tom Hansen Conference Medal winner, awarded to the school's top graduating student-athlete. Only the NCAA Championships remained.
"The biggest thing for me and for our team was that we wanted to win the team title," Seliskar said. "That was the goal all year. I wanted to step up in swimming and try to be a better role model for my teammates. I didn't want to talk big. I just wanted to show up every day and swim really fast. My teammates knew it and I knew it. I was just going to light it up."
Cal captured the 2019 national title as Seliskar swept all three of his individual events (200 IM, 200 free and 200 breast) and was named Swimmer of the Meet.
With his collegiate career now over, Seliskar isn't quite ready to pivot toward something else. He'll remain in Berkeley to join the brotherhood of past and future Olympians training with Durden, with the dream of parlaying his consistent efforts and newfound personal accountability into a spot at the 2020 Olympic Games.
"I've always loved swimming, but I love swimming so much more now with the team that we have and my coaches than I ever did before," Seliskar said. "I've learned a lot about how to be responsible from being in this program. In the same way that Cal isn't a university that's going to hold your hand, the men's swim team is not going to hold your hand … You have to learn how to be responsible and how to manage that on your own, how to ask for help, how to change your attitude."
