Chesterton sophomore Vlad Lutterman shocks the region, shaves 10 seconds in a month from his 200 IM time, wins Hobart sectional and heads to Indy for state meet

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

’Tis the swimming season for lifetime bests. The swimmers wear new tech suits, shave, and taper their training. All those factors contribute to bringing times down, and then every once in a great while a swimmer tears through the water in a way that defies explanation.
Chesterton sophomore Vlad Lutterman, who routinely finished behind multiple teammates in the 200-yard individual medley during the regular season, had the best time at the sectional preliminaries and then backed it up two days later with a sectional title and significantly better time?
Did that really happen?
It did.
How?
“I don’t know,” Lutterman said.
Then he listed the factors that help every swimmer this time of year, including the new suit, the shaving, and “the training, especially the training” all contributed.
OK, but that applies to all swimmers. Then both he and his brother, Wolfe, mentioned additional factors, different from each other. Wolfe noted his brother’s improvement in the backstroke.
“Pressure,” Vlad said. “That pressure helps.”
Big meets tend to send the adrenaline flowing faster and a small percentage of athletes appear to be hyper-respondents to the adrenaline boost. Clearly, Vlad Lutterman must be in that group.
“You’re not doing your best and then all of the sudden you are,” he said. “That switch in your brain is flipped. Sometimes you feel it. Sometimes you don’t. You don’t really know until you look up at the clock and there it is.”
Vlad touched the wall, looked up, and there it was on the scoreboard at last Saturday’s sectional meet at Hobart: 1:57.82.
He explained how seeing that made him feel: “I feel proud, you know? I feel happy. And most importantly, I feel accomplished. I feel like I’ve really done something.”
The reason he feels that way is because he has done something not many do, shaving seconds as if they were whiskers.
A check of the Meet Mobile app reveals he has trimmed almost 12 seconds since swimming a 2:09.43 for fifth place at a Dec. 2 dual meet at Crown Point in a race in which teammates junior Liam Eschbach (2:05.80) and freshman Aadin Guzzo (2:07.53) finished well ahead of him.
OK, but that was a long time ago.
For a more recent look, check out what he did in a Jan. 20 dual meet with Portage. He swam a 2:07.84, to finish .02 behind his brother, Wolfe.
So, from Jan. 20 to Feb. 21, he trimmed 9.98 seconds, which basically translates to 10 seconds in a month.
A big chunk of that drop came when he shattered his lifetime best at another big meet, the DAC Championships, drawing almost within one-and-a-half seconds of Eschbach with a fifth-place finish and a 2:01.50 time.
Then came the mind-blowers, the sectional prelim and final.
“When he got first in prelims,” Wolfe said, “that was the first shocking thing, that he was able to do that. And then we were thinking maybe he could win it outright. But either way, I knew at least a Chesterton athlete would win it because it was him, Liam or Aaidan, so it was likely one of our guys would win it.”
Wolfe and Vlad started swimming the same year, so Wolfe always figured Vlad, having more years to develop, eventually would swim faster times than his best. He just didn’t know it would already happen.
“I’m proud of him and a little bit just disappointed in myself because I feel like maybe I could have done better, but there’s not much I can do now,” Wolfe said.
If Wolfe gets the academic scholarship for which he has applied at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, he intends to swim there.
The only thing that could have made swimming at the state meet better for Vlad would have been for his brother to join him.
Sometimes, a younger sibling doesn’t bloom until his older sibling has moved on, so it can subconsciously hold back the younger athlete.
“I don’t think it held me back,” Vlad said. “If anything, it was an encouragement, swimming in Wolfie’s lane during practice ’cause I was trying to be like him. My brother and I really don’t fight.”
Surpassing his brother gave Vlad mixed emotions: “Part of me feels a little sad that I’m going beyond my brother and part of me feels proud about it.”
One source of Wolfe’s pride in Vlad is that the sectional title didn’t come in his favorite events. He wonders if maybe Coach Jenni Kellstrom “saw something in him,” that would make him well-suited for the IM race.
“He prefers distance and breaststroke, and the IM is just one of those things he’s doing because Jenni assigned him to do it, and now he’s winning sectionals at it,” Wolfe marveled. “It was definitely the backstroke that was most shocking in looking at his splits.”
Vlad’s backstroke split vs. Portage was 34.49, compared to 31.65 a month later.
Since Kellstrom might be able to teach a grasshopper how to do the backstroke, maybe that’s not so shocking. In addition to winning three state titles at 50 meters, Kellstrom, then Anderson, won three backstroke state titles, setting the state record as a junior and breaking it as a senior. She then went onto an All-American career that included swimming the backstroke in the medley relay team that placed first when Auburn won the 2004 national championship.
Vlad enters Friday’s preliminaries at IU Natatorium on the campus of IU Indianapolis as the 27th seed among 32 swimmers. The top eight in each event advance to the next day’s championship final, the next eight go to the consolation final. His seed time is 2.75 seconds slower than the No. 16, a big gap, but once that adrenaline starts pumping, he has been known to surprise people, so anything’s possible.