By Jonathan Okanes, Cal Athletic Communications
BERKELEY – It may look like Cal swimmer Jesse Ryckman exhibited a lot of patience before finally qualifying for the NCAA Championships during his senior year.
But that journey looks like a trip through the Express Lane at a supermarket compared with what he endured before he ever arrived in Berkeley.
When Ryckman was a sophomore at Oaks Christian High School in Westlake Village, he took a shot to the left eye so severely while playing water polo that he suffered a detached retina. What followed were a series of surgeries and recoveries that would test the patience of even the richest in discipline.
After an operation that re-attached his retina, Ryckman was forced to lie face down on a massage table for eight weeks to ensure it healed properly. He was allowed to get up five minutes per hour to use the bathroom, grab a bite to eat or take a shower. When he slept, he lined his side with pillows to make sure he didn’t roll over.
“That wasn’t fun. It was pretty miserable,” said Ryckman, who will compete in the 100 and 200 backstroke at this week’s NCAA Championships Iowa City, Iowa. “It was hard to get through. I didn’t go crazy, but it was close. It was almost like solitary confinement. You mentally broke down sometimes.”
Doctors told Ryckman he couldn’t read because his eyes would be moving. The one activity he was permitted to do was play video games, so his parents hooked up a plasma TV on the floor and Ryckman passed the time playing video games while looking down through the hole in the massage table.
“I played video games almost every day,” Ryckman said. “I’ve always been a pretty good video game player. I was really good after that.”
Ryckman had designs on swimming or playing water polo in college, and didn’t want his recovery to set back his schoolwork. So his parents read to him or had him orally answers to questions. A teacher from Oaks Christian would come to his home and proctor tests, which Ryckman would again answer orally and have them transcribed.
Other than video games and schoolwork, Ryckman also passed the time by hanging out with visitors. Along with his parents and younger sister, friends would periodically visit the house to check up on him. Ryckman said the ordeal produced some of his best friends, and two of those friends are Bridget Carney and Tory Fitch, fellow swimmers who spent a lot of time with Ryckman to help him through his recovery.
“It was definitely a tough time for him,” said Carney, who recently graduated from UC Santa Cruz. “I wanted to be there as much as I could. It was pretty miserable for him. But he had determination and remained positive about the whole situation. He acknowledged it happened and said he was moving on. He wasn’t going to let it drag him down or weigh too heavily on his aspirations of what he wanted to do.”
What he wanted to do is get back in the water as quickly as possible, but that didn’t prove to be easy. Following the eight weeks to let his retina heal, he had to have a minor procedure to remove oil from his eye. But he also had to have correctional surgery because the eye started to drift to one side. He additionally had to have a series of cataract and laser surgeries to deal with scar tissue that was forming in his eye.
“I felt like in high school I could have been a pretty good swimmer, but I was always taking time for surgeries or to take care of the issues,” Ryckman said.
As it turned out, Ryckman was still pretty good in high school. When he finally put all of the surgeries behind him, he began to dramatically drop his times. He ended up winning multiple league titles and took home the CIF Southern Section Division II backstroke title as a senior.
He received recruiting letters from a handful of schools, but Ryckman was set on finding the best combination of athletics and academics possible. So he wrote to Cal coach David Durden.
“His background in the sport is a little bit different than other guys, and that’s part of the reason why we gave him a shot on our team,” Durden said. “Every year he has worked on improving an aspect of his swimming.”
He’s worked enough that he now finds himself on college swimming’s biggest stage, something he wasn’t sure was possible when he first came on campus – and something that was far from his mind as he honed his video game-playing skills on that massage table.
“It’s kind of surreal right now,” Ryckman said. “I still kind of don’t believe I made NCs. I never thought I could get here. Once you start realizing you can be on the same level with some of these guys, it’s a pretty amazing feeling. I’ve been working hard and it was something I wanted to do for myself and for my team. I want to make it to NCs. I want to be there fighting.”
