HIGH ACHIEVERS: John McCrae’s HPA program triggered Alex Pilieci’s swimming & school success

By Martin Cleary

When Alex Pilieci graduated from Kars on the Rideau Public School in 2020, the next natural move for him would have been to enrol at South Carleton High School in Richmond, ON.

But there was a conflict.

Pilieci was a competitive swimmer and his morning weekday practices with the Nepean-Kanata Barracudas at the Nepean Sportsplex pool didn’t end until 8 a.m.

His first Grade 9 class each day at South Carleton was scheduled to start at 8 a.m. Under ideal travel conditions, it would take at least 30 minutes to get to South Carleton from the pool each day.

It wasn’t going to work and certainly not the best way for Pilieci to start his high school education.

But when Pilieci discovered the High Performance Athletics program at John McCrae Secondary School in Barrhaven, his academic and athletic programs fell smoothly into place for four years.

HPA has been a long-time program to provide academic support to elite athletes competing at provincial, national and international levels in a variety of sports.

The student-athletes receive individualized timetables, a long-range vision of their four-year academic career, flexible classroom attendance, Web-based resources to compliment classroom learning and assistance from a guidance counsellor.

HPA worked wonders for Pilieci, who combined his flexible academic program with his rigorous swimming training and competition schedule to not only qualify for the Swimming Canada 2024 Olympic trials in April, but also earn acceptance into Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, for the 2024-25 school year.

“I was supposed to go to South Carleton High School, but the classes started at 8 a.m. and my practices ended near 8 a.m.,” Pilieci, 18, explained in a recent phone interview. “It would have been too hard to make the time and I wouldn’t have made my first class.”

But by attending John McCrae Secondary School and being enrolled in the HPA program, Pilieci was able to extend his swimming career to a high level and strive for his athletic and academic goals at the same time.

“The teachers were understanding . . . and gave us support and extensions. They gave us more lead time to finish assignments,” Pilieci added.

Several times a year, Pilieci said he would have multi-day swim meets or out-of-town training camps that could last as long as two weeks. Doing academic assignments and studying at swim meets or camps were difficult because of the long time commitment each day at the pool.

But Pilieci’s commitment and dedication to his academic and athletic programs allowed him to attend Le Moyne College, which is one of 28 Jesuit institutions in the United States and is recognized as a top business school with a 98-per-cent success rate for having its graduates find study-related employment.

Athletically, Le Moyne College will complete its first year as an NCAA Division 1 school on July 1. (Its varsity teams previously participated in Division 2.) At the end of May, the college announced the Le Moyne Athletics Complex will undergo a $45-million renovation, which will include improvements to the pool and diving venue.

“All of those things got me excited,” Pilieci said about his commitment to Le Moyne.

Pilieci had offers from 10 to 15 American universities and colleges and visited Le Moyne, Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio, before making his final decision in early December.

He hasn’t selected his academic major, but it will likely involve accounting, finance and economics.

“I’d like to get a top-three result in the (Northeast) conference and hope the team can win the conference,” Pilieci said about his swimming goals. “That would be amazing.”

In the pool, Pilieci focuses on the butterfly stroke, which is one of the most difficult and strategic disciplines in swimming.

At the recent Canadian 2024 Olympic team trials in Toronto, he improved his personal-best times in his 100- and 200-metre butterfly races.

The 200-metre race is his favourite and he qualified for the B final at the trials, where he finished 19th overall in two minutes, 7.67 seconds. In his preliminary swim, he was timed in 2:07.84.

“It was a PB, but, honestly, I was disappointed,” Pilieci said. “I was hoping to go under 2:07. It was one of the first long-course 200-metre races of my season. I still have a lot more work to do.”

A swimmer’s season is divided into two parts: a long-course season for racing in a full 50-metre pool and a short-course season, where barriers are inserted to make the pool only 25 metres in length.

The 100-metre butterfly is a relatively new focus for Pilieci and it also serves as a good training tool for his 200-metre race. At the trials, he dipped under 57 seconds for the first time with a clocking of 56.91 seconds.

“The 100 fly was my best race by eight-tenths of a second. It was my first time under 57 seconds,” he added.

When Pilieci mentioned his other trials race, the 200-metre individual medley, he started with a laugh.

“I dove into the pool (for the butterfly) and my goggles fell off over my mouth. I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t see. But I did enough training that I knew how many strokes it was to the wall (each time). I kept my composure,” he explained.

Competing at his first Olympic trials was one thing, but qualifying for that honour definitely is his main highlight.

When his Barracudas club travelled to the New Brunswick championships in December, 2022, Pilieci was hoping to achieve the time standard to qualify for the 2024 Olympic trials. But his time of 2:10.90 left him one one-hundredth of a second shy of that goal.

“I looked at the scoreboard. I looked at my teammates. ‘Am I seeing that right?’ They said, ‘yes.’ I was sad,” Pilieci said about his heartbreaking swim.

“I thought to myself ‘do I want to keep doing this?’ That (thought) lasted about 20 minutes. I love swimming. I had been doing it for 10 years. I knew the (Olympic trials) time was possible.”

Several months later at a low-key meet in Ottawa, Pilieci achieved his goal of qualifying for the Olympic trials, which triggered an instant celebration.

“I didn’t have much pressure on me,” he said. “My teammates and coach (Scott Faithfull) knew I wanted (the time) and they helped me. I used a different strategy by going out easier and coming back hard.

“My teammate Jace Borden swam beside me. He just missed it, but I got it. He jumped over the lane (marker), jumped on me and almost drowned me.”

Read More of our 2024 High School Best Series, presented by Louis-Riel Sports-Études, as we tip our caps to top local student-athletes at: OttawaSportsPages.ca/Ottawa-High-School-Best-2024

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