Chesterton sophomore Greydon Pieroni spreads his wings to fly 100 yards to win the event in a dual meet at Crown Point

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

Some high school students if assigned essays on how they spent their summer, could wax poetic about vacations to faraway places and/or nearby hidden gems.
Chesterton sophomore Greydon Pieroni would not need more than one sentence to sum up his summer. It would go something like this: I spent the entire summer in the swimming pool training.
“I went every day,” Pieroni said of summer workouts. “I think I missed maybe like one or two days the whole summer.”
No summer vacation?
“No,” he said.
Why not?
“This is why,” he said, pointing to the water. “All I did was this.”
His motivation: “I want to be the best.”
Last season, Pieroni finished fifth at the Valparaiso sectional in the 100-yard butterfly with a 53.86 and was sixth in the 100 backstroke with a 57.44, not bad for a freshman. He’s not interested in “not bad.” Remember, he wants to be the best, so he’s not content with fifth-and-sixth-place finishes at the sectional meet anymore.
Pieroni opened his sophomore season by winning the 100 fly in a dual meet at Crown Point on Tuesday night and swam it with his best time, a 52.99 after a particularly strong start. The state standard for the event is 50.96.
Pieroni said that he swam the first half of the race in a time equivalent to his best 50 fly mark, “so I was pretty happy with that. I’m a little sad that I was like 28 on the way back. Overall, I just wanted to be faster.”
He’ll get faster, but for openers, he was fast enough to win the race. He didn’t compete in the backstroke Tuesday, instead swimming the 200 freestyle in 1:49.17, finishing second to Crown Point’s Abel Guel by 1.21 seconds. Guel finished 20th in the event at state last season, so Pieroni stayed relatively close to an accomplished swimmer.
And it was just a start.
Pieroni is too young to know what ultimately will be his best event.
“Probably still the 100 fly. And my secondary event might be the backstroke,” he said. “I’m rotating between all of them now because if you show improvement in one stroke, you’ll improve in them all. Like if you drop time in the 100 breaststroke, you’ll probably drop time in something else.”
Pieroni is a young man with a plan, an aggressive one full of challenges to chase this winter.
“I want to meet my goals,” he said. “I have a lot of goals. Like for the 200 I want to go like 1:40, 1:42. For the 100 free, I want to go 46. And then for the 100 fly, I want to go like 49. There are more, but it takes too long to list them.”
He has a long way to go to reach those goals, but he’s off to a good start.