Riley Verb likes to swim – fast.
During a three-day swim event July 21-23 he will discover just how fast he can swim.
The Bluffton 12-year-old has qualified to compete in the Junior Olympics through his USA swim team at the Putnam County YMCA. The event is at Miami (Ohio) University. He will compete in three events: 50-, 100-, and 200-yard breaststroke against other 11- and 12-year-old boys.
Are you nervous? Riley just shrugs his shoulders. We take that to mean “maybe, or sort of.”
Riley, who will be a seventh grader in Bluffton Middle School in August, swims with the Bluffton swim team in the summer and year-around with the Putnam YMCA team. His YMCA coach is Breanne Schroeder. His Bluffton swim team coach is his dad, Robert Verb.
We asked Riley for his best times in the three breaststroke events. He told us: 40 seconds in the 50-yard, 1 minute 28 seconds in the 100-yard and 3 minutes 17 seconds in the 200-yard event.
When competing at Miami he will first enter preliminaries. To advance to the finals in any of the three events he must finish among the top eight swimmers.
If you could swim against anyone in the world, who would that be?
Riley quickly answered, “Adam Peaty." He is a British breaststroke swimmer who has represented Great Britain in the Olympics and other world championships.
“Peaty can swim the 50 in 20 seconds and the 100 in 55 seconds,” said Riley.
What’s the toughest part of competitive swimming? Riley says it might be the starts or turns. “I don’t have those mastered,” he said, as he began to relate the hydrodynamics of diving deep and long.
He lost us when he started explaining the number of ways to turn when hitting the wall.
