Kimani Gregory

Penn Hills

The past week: Gregory upset two-time defending champion and WPIAL record-holder Mason Gonzalez of North Allegheny by 0.05 seconds and set a new mark of 44.09 in the Class 3A 100-yard freestyle at Tree’s Pool. The junior also defended his title in the 100 butterfly (48.45).

Check this out: Gregory’s winning time in the 100 butterfly was a 1.72-second improvement over 2017, and he dropped 0.82 seconds off his 100 freestyle time. He is already being looked at by N.C. State, Arizona State, Tennessee, Ohio State, Texas and Harvard.

You’ve had a few days to reflect. What does winning that race mean to you now? It was a very good feeling. It was kind of surreal once I finished the race because I didn’t really expect to win. I’m not going to lie, I thought he was going to beat me and I just wanted to go in there and give it my all.

What’s it like to be the fastest in the WPIAL in two events? To have it happen in two events, it’s an amazing feeling and it gives you a sense of pride that I did what I could and what we expected to do.

How did you get into swimming? That was actually my mom. Me and my brothers didn’t want to do swimming at all. I was mainly involved in football, my brother [Isaiah] tried to do baseball, we did soccer and then my mom said she was going to put us in swimming. We thought it was going to be a little fun thing before we got back into other sports, but then we stuck with it.

Do you like it? Yeah. I guess it worked out for the best. At first I didn’t because we weren’t getting noticed. We’d go to meets and we didn’t have anybody to sit by and we sat far away, people didn’t want to talk to us and things like that. We kind of decided to quit and we were going to, but my mom told us to stick with it and we did and the rest is history.

How is the recruiting process? It’s a very busy thing and it’s almost like you have a separate life. You go from being just a normal athlete and a normal guy to a business thing talking about what’s paying for what, how are you going to get here. It used to be your parents and where do you want to go. Now it includes financials, how are you going to get home if you get sick, do they have the best interests in you and do they have the right academics.