Grant Beebe remembers the spring of his freshman year like it was yesterday. Beebe, a member of Nantucket’s Class of 2021, had just begun swimming year-round and found himself often being one of two people at the pool. The other was Tyler Roethke, a member of Nantucket’s Class of 2020 who swam at Boston College last year. He entered the transfer portal after the season and took his talents to UMass Amherst’s Division I swimming program, where he is swimming this fall with Beebe.
“Some of those morning practices, I mean, we would have some 9 pm practices and then have to be up the next day at 6 am for practice,” Roethke said. “I just remember some of those mornings and those lights wouldn’t even be on in the locker room. Some mornings we wouldn’t even say words to each other. We would just go sit next to each other in the locker room in complete silence knowing we were both about to get wrecked. It was so unspoken and it was a non-verbal thank god you are here with me at least.”
“Come the spring there are a lot less people at the pool since not everyone wants to swim year round so it was always just me and Tyler,” Beebe said. “We would come into the locker room every day knowing it was going to be hell. I’m thankful we had each other because if I had to do that alone it would have been awful.”
Roethke is entering his sophomore year of college while Beebe is entering his freshman year. They began their first college swim practices together on September 1. Their first meet is this weekend at Colgate University. Both Roethke and Beebe have enjoyed the first five weeks of the swim season so far and believe it is a perfect culture fit.
“The culture is so strong. We are best friends out of the pool but as soon as we get into that thing we are the worst of enemies,” Roethke said. “Grant and I don’t train in the same groups but there are times when we are definitely peeking over at each other. It is like having 25 other Grants all around me. It is such a war zone every practice.”
The two have developed their craft and morphed themselves into Division I athletes, but each of them took a different path to get to where they are today.
Roethke has always been a swimmer. It has been a lifestyle for him. He considers his family a swimming family and has been swimming for as long as he can remember. But Beebe began swimming in the fourth grade and quit after his sixth grade season to focus on soccer. It wasn’t until eighth grade when his father told him to play a winter sport that he got back into the pool.
“I was never that good when I was younger and Tyler was always up in the lanes way ahead of me,” Beebe said. “So I was never even really training with him back then. In that year off I had a pretty big growth spurt, stretched out a little bit, lost some weight in the gut, and had a much better swimming body when I got back to it. That is when I started to really appreciate what I didn’t see before, began making goals for myself, and grinding in practice. I have been hooked to swimming ever since.”
The grinding began to pay off and Roethke began to take notice of it during his freshman year.
“Come like eighth grade and freshman year I remember seeing this kid creeping up on me but I didn’t know him very well at all,” Roethke said. “Every month or so he would get one lane closer. Then before I knew it I came in one day and he was right on my tail. We have been duking it out ever since and it has been a good run.”
Beebe had always looked at Roethke more as a role model rather than a friend leading up to his return to swimming. It began with several text messages from Beebe to Roethke asking about the swim team and what it was like to swim at the state tournament. Beebe wanted to become as fast as Roethke and enjoy a similar level of success. That obsession to become equally as great led to tremendous development in Beebe’s swimming capabilities. He eventually broke the school record for the 100 fly during his freshman year of high school, the one individual record he still has to this day.
“I remember him getting quicker and quicker so I started paying more attention to him,” Roethke said. “I remember noticing how hard he was working and how seriously he was taking it. I would always kind of laugh at him a little bit and think ‘god this kid is such a nerd he wants to know everything.’”
Beebe and Roethke believe there is no doubt they made one another better. Roethke believes without Beebe he could have found himself coasting through high school practices while Beebe believes without Roethke he never would have been able to find the drive to transform himself into the elite swimmer he has become today.
One moment both remember fondly that speaks to their competitive nature was during Roethke’s senior year of high school while Beebe was a junior. The two said they would go back and forth breaking the Nantucket pool record for the 50 free.
“We literally made it a game and would just take turns,” Roethke said. “One meet he would swim in it and the next meet I would swim in it. I think four or five times straight one of us broke it and then one of us would break it again.”
Beebe won the 50 free title with a record time at that point of 21:68 during the 2020 state tournament. But later on in the tournament Roethke led the Whalers off in the 200 free relay.
“He went and got a 21.61,” Beebe said. “So he broke the record later on in the meet during the relay. But I am on the relay getting ready for the anchor leg pumped up and happy to see it because I want us going as fast as we can.”
“I broke the record in that relay but Grant did have the come from behind win at the end of it so it was a win-win,” Roethke added. “But I will always remember that moment in particular. We must have broken the 50 free eight times that season.”
Beebe said his initial impression of college swimming is that it is a whole different animal from what he experienced in high school. He said it is only September and he is already feeling the strain of the long, grueling practices.
“It is unlike anything I have ever done,” Beebe said. “I have more time dedicated just to my training. I have a whole set up program. It is tough with way more hours, training, and lifting, which I didn’t do at all in high school really. Now we are doing all sorts of lifting along with way more swimming. But I love it. That is what makes you better.”
Roethke said the time commitment each week is at least 20 hours.
“Yeah I would say it is about 20 hours per week of nonstop, absolute brutality,” he said. “Grant and I don’t always train in the same lane but we will go up to each other after practice quietly and just say ‘that one hurt huh?’”
Roethke said he has his eyes set on an invitational at Boston University right before Thanksgiving. The invitational will feature several New England teams, including his former team at Boston College.
“I don’t want to make myself look like a fool,” Roethke said. “That has been a lot of motivation for me personally. As for my goals to help this team, I want to make sure I can put myself in the best position to contribute, especially on relays. I am looking forward to A-10s in February, making those finals, and scoring a bunch of points.”
Beebe and Roethke said they feel like their relationship can sometimes fall in line with that of an old married couple; two people who care a lot about each other but find themselves arguing and bickering at times in the heat of the moment.
“When I am spending as much time with him as I have had to over the years and he is spending as much time with me, there will be moments where tension builds up,” Beebe said. “The two of us were spending more time with each other than we were with our families at some points. We were always coming to the pool every single day, consistently swimming eight times per week. That can be tough. You get close and tension can build when you are going back and forth.”
They say they are excited to create more memories in and out of the pool with one another. They said the the brotherhood that has developed between the two through a common interest and love for swimming is something they will always be thankful for.
“At the end of the day all of those challenges made us boys though,” Beebe said. “We went through some really tough sets together and some stuff no one else can relate to. That will build a bond and make you brothers.”
