Coming into Penn, senior breaststroke specialist Neo Matsuyama didn’t stand out as the fastest guy in the pool. He wasn’t sure if his swimming skills were enough to impress the coach and earn a spot on the roster. All he knew was that if he were to be on the team, he would work as hard as he could. He just needed the coach to take a chance on him.
“Thank God he did,” Matsuyama joked.
Matsuyama’s first encounter with swimming came before he could even speak. While his family was staying at a hotel, he and his mother made their way to the pool, where he began splashing around.
“I think I was like one years old,” he recalled. “My mom was watching me from the side of the pool, and I was having fun.”
Then, in an instant, everything changed. Matsuyama drifted farther and farther into the pool, and before he knew it, he was fighting for his life.
“I accidentally stepped into the deep end of the pool,” Matsuyama said. “I started to flare my arms, gasping for air. I was actually pretty much drowning.”
Everything after that happened in a blur. His mother jumped in to pull him out, and he was soon taken to the emergency room. Though Matsuyama eventually came out unharmed, the incident left a lasting impression on his mother.
“After that, [my mom] got really scared, and so she started putting me into swimming lessons.” This was the start of his lifelong journey in swimming.
Growing up in Japan, Matsuyama was a multi-sport athlete. He was involved in soccer, baseball, ski, and ice hockey, among other sports. But none of these other sports brought him as much joy and excitement as swimming. Swimming felt different. Unlike other sports where he competed against others, Matsuyama fell in love with swimming because he was racing against himself.
“When you are racing on a relay, it’s very individual-focused,” Matsuyama said. “It’s about what you can do to the best of your ability … I kind of enjoyed that.”
When Matsuyama was around 11 years old, his family moved to Maryland.
Living in the Washington area opened up a new level of competition for him in swimming, and he quickly found himself in a much more structured and competitive environment. He joined the Nation’s Capital Swim Club, one of the country’s top programs that has produced swimmers like Katie Ledecky, and he began to learn how to compete on bigger stages under pressure.
The club taught him more than just swimming, though. While Matsuyama competed for his high school during the season, he spent most of this time training with the club team members.
“[I was] spending every single day with them training, going through the trenches with all the hard training,” Matsuyama recalled. “I kind of realized that [swimming] is more of a team sport than I thought it was initially.”
“The people that I got to swim with were honestly more than half of the reason why I decided to stay in the sport and why I enjoy it so much,” he added.
Matsuyama finished his high school swimming career strong, earning the Honorable Mention nod from The Washington Post by his senior year. When it came time to decide where he would take his talents to college, Penn was a clear choice.
“Penn has historically been very strong at breaststroke,” Matsuyama said. “There’s been Olympians like Matt Fallon, and there’s been a long history [of] NCAA qualifiers and breaststroke events from Penn.”
Matsuyama has looked up to former Penn breaststroke specialist Matt Fallon for a long time. When Matsuyama arrived on campus, he had a chance to follow Fallon’s footsteps at Penn. He soon earned a spot on the team as a walk-on recruit, and since then, he hasn’t looked back.
“The swim committee brought me close with some people that I never thought I would interact with,” Matsuyama said. “I spend so many hours a day with these guys on a typical training day.”
“We went through all the trenches together,” Matsuyama added. “I think there’s a common theme of [how] you get really close with and you really enjoy time with people when you’re going through tough hours.”
With his team, Matsuyama went on to appear in numerous championships at Penn, earning third place at the recent ECAC Open Swimming and Diving Championships with an outstanding time of 2:01.16 in the 200-yard breaststroke. Along with his teammates, Matsuyama helped Penn secure third place over the championship weekend.
After four years of swimming and grinding through his mathematics major, Matsuyama is just weeks away from tossing his cap and graduating.
“Whether [joining Penn was] destiny or not, I don’t really know,” Matsuyama said. “I’m not really into all that, like, ‘destiny,’ but I do think things happen for a reason.”
“The fact that I got into Penn and had a blast here … ” he said, trailing off for a moment.
“It was just meant to be.”
