North Carolina State University Athletics
TIM PEELER: Swimming -- And Nanna -- Changed His Life
12/23/2005 12:00:00 AM | Swimming
Dec. 23, 2005
.BY TIM PEELER
RALEIGH -- Peter Ranstead had never swum before. Not competitively, anyway.
Long before he became a top sprinter on the NC State men's swimming team, Ranstead was a football player and tough guy. Some in his family might say too tough. As a kid, he was a bit of a trouble-maker. While playing unattended with matches at his parents' home in Orland Park, Ill., he once set the back porch on fire. He almost got kicked out of elementary school for his bad behavior.
It wasn't until he started spending every afternoon with his grandmother, Alice Eldridge, that Ranstead found discipline, manners and a little self-control.
And now, just before he dives into the water, Ranstead bends his head to his arm and kisses the inside of his left biceps, where the simple word "Nanna" is tattooed.
Few college athletes might admit to having such a soft spot for a grandparent, but the burly Ranstead, who still looks very much like a free safety, quite proudly wears his affection inside his sleeve, for the lady he quit school to take care of as she died of cancer.
To be honest, Ranstead isn't sure what might have happened to him had he not developed such a closeness to his maternal grandmother. But he knows for certain that he wouldn't have ended up on the circuitous path that has led him to Raleigh to compete this season for the Wolfpack.
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For five years, they bonded and Ranstead straightened his path. So when Nanna needed him, after being diagnosed with lung and kidney cancer, Ranstead stopped going to school to take care of her.
"I just wanted to make her happy," Ranstead said.
For three months - the cancer spread and took its toll quickly - Ranstead attended her needs, ran errands for his grandfather, did what he could around the house. He didn't worry about school.
But Alice Eldridge did worry about her grandson. She hated that he played football, and she let him know it.
"I would come home with cuts and bruises, and one time I had a separated shoulder," he said. "So one day we were sitting at home and she said `Why do you have to play football?'" The question was moot, because Ranstead had given up the sport when he stopped going to school. But he also admitted to her that it was the only thing he had ever tried.
"I would like you to try another sport," she said to him one afternoon. "You know, I always liked to swim."
She had never done it competitively. Mainly, she would go to the pool at her condominium while her husband played golf.
Not long after his grandmother died, when he caught up on the work he missed by going to summer and night school, Ranstead's best friend, Scott Cassidy, signed him up for the swim team during gym class.
Ranstead had no idea he was even on the team until Coach Jim Caliendo called him one day and asked why he wasn't at practice.
"What are you talking about?" Ranstead replied.
There were days when he wished he had never jumped in the pool during his sophomore year of high school. He was little more than a rank beginner on a team full of swimmers who had been competing most of their lives. "I wasn't very good at all," he said. "They would tease me and tell me to quit. They said I would never amount to anything in the pool."
They were wrong.
Inspired by their taunts, and by the memory of his late grandmother, Ranstead got better. In a hurry, even though he only swam competitively three months out of the year.
He was a six-time all-conference performer and as a senior finished fourth in the Illinois state swim meet in the 50-meter freestyle. He managed to get the attention of some college recruiters, even though he was still as green as a holly tree.
Ranstead wasn't sure if he could compete at the highest level of NCAA athletics, so he enrolled at the University of Tampa, a Division II school where he managed to shave more than half a second off his time in the 50-free. He was an Division II All-America in the sprint events, on course to win national championships if he had decided to stay. But the overall lifestyle in Tampa didn't sit well with Ranstead, who says he wanted to focus more on getting better than partying with his teammates. So after three semesters at Tampa, he transferred to Iowa, where one of his older sisters had gone to school.
He had to sit out a semester there, but still managed to help the Hawkeye 200-meter medley relay team set a school and Big Ten record at the conference championship meet.
However, after a year and a half at Iowa, Ranstead was told the school was going to cut about $1.8 million from its athletics department. Much of that was going to come from scholarship reductions in men's Olympic sports, like swimming, track, tennis and gymnastics.
Ranstead said his family couldn't afford for him to be cut down to a 15 percent scholarship, and he and several of his teammates started to look for new schools. He happened to talk to Iowa teammate Kevin Velleca, who had been recruited out of high school by NC State and was considering transferring into Wolfpack coach Brooks Teal's program.
Both swimmers ended up coming to NC State, with Velleca competing the last two seasons. Ranstead had to sit out all of last season because of NCAA transfer guidelines, but so far he has made the most out of his only season competing for the Wolfpack.
Ranstead gives Teal, whose team is ranked No. 24 in the nation, another quality sprinter to go along with All-America Cullen Jones. Ranstead has his time in the 50 free down to 20.53 seconds and in the 100-meter freestyle down to 45.96.
"He absolutely gives us a very powerful one-two punch in the sprints," Teal said. "The chance for them to go 1-2 in any sprints in a dual meet are very good. If they are both on any relay, it's close to a guaranteed win."
Ranstead is still shaking off the rust of sitting out last year. But he is ecstatic about spending his senior year with the Wolfpack, after spending the summer training with Jones in Coco Beach, Fla. He's even thinking about the possibilities of competing professionally after college, something he would have never dreamed of when he first started swimming as a high school sophomore.
He still gets choked up when talking about his grandmother, and he remains close to his grandfather, who is still going strong at the age of 91. They were on the phone together throughout the entire first game of the World Series, rooting together for their hometown Chicago White Sox.
And Ranstead thinks he knows the perfect way to honor him, too.
"I told him when I make the Olympics, I'll get `Papa' tattooed on my other arm," Ranstead said.
You may contact Tim Peeler at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
