What it comes down to for Colby Ellefson isn’t so much about the others in the pool.

“I really like pushing myself with swimming; I like getting faster,” the Sequim High senior noted.

Ellefson put that personal motivation to good use this past weekend, setting a pair of school records on his way to two to-five finishes at the state 1A/2A meet in Federal Way.

In preliminaries on Feb. 16, the Sequim teen set personal bests and set school standards with a 1:52.11 and fourth place in the 200 freestyle, and set a PR and school best in the 500 free with a fifth place finish in the 500 free in 5:10.98.

A day later in the finals, he swam a near identical time in the 200 free (1:52.19) to take fourth and clipped two seconds off his own 500 free record in 5:08.95 as he and Rowan Jung of South Whidbey produced a rare tie for fifth place.

Based on his two swims, Sequim tallied 28.5 team points and placed 22nd at the state meet.

With not enough Sequim high swimmers to form a full team, Ellefson — and this year with three teammates — competed with Port Angeles during the regular season but swam for his “home school” in the postseason.

Photo by Eric Ellefson / With coach Britt Hemphill urging him on, Sequim High’s Colby Ellefson races to a strong finish at the class 1A/2A state meet in Federal Way last week, where he earned two top-five finishes.

Britt Hemphill, who’s coached Ellefson the past three postseasons, said they added a weekly RPT (Race Pace Training), a high intensity training session to Ellefson’s workouts this season and it paid of big time at the state finals. Hemphill said a friend of his, highly-ranked Masters swimmer Dan Stephenson, introduced him to the concept and though it might serve Ellefson well.

“I said, ‘This can be good for you’ and he was like, ‘I’m in, I’m all in’,” Hemphill recalled.

“It made a huge difference (this season),” Hemphill said. “I saw, Colby saw it.

“It was fun to see him finish super strong.”

Getting started

A swimmer since about the age of 8, Ellefson said he started putting in time in the pool about a year before the Sequim Aquatic Recreation Center (SARC) shut down in 2015 (it reopened in October 2016 under management of Olympic Peninsula YMCA).

Also an accomplished long distance runner with two state cross country meets to his credit, Ellefson said he wound up excelling at the longer distance swim disciplines based a bit on his genetics and some on his distance racing.

“It might be my background in running; I’m training in distance year round. I think it kind of carries over.”

Ellefson’s prep career nearly started with a full stop: high school sports were suspended in the spring of 2020 and restrictions on practices and competitions continued through the next prep sports seasons, wiping out swimming postseasons for 2020-21.

As a freshman, Ellefson was literally a team of one.

“I really thought there were going to be two, three, four swimmers [that first year],” he recalled. “I showed up and there were no others.”

By his sophomore season he had adjusted fairly well to swimming as a co-op with Port Angeles High’s team, with many fast swimmers he already knew from swimming with a Port Angles-based club team.

In his sophomore year, Ellefson said, “I really tried to get more people on the team [in Sequim] but it just didn’t work out.”

Hemphill, a former Port Angeles swim coach and collegiate swimming standout at UCLA, had Ellefson on his radar by that year.

“The biggest thing was, I knew that postseason you’ve got to swim for your home school,” he said. So he approached Sally Cole, Port Angeles High’s coach, about taking Ellefson under his coaching wing for the 2021-22 postseason. Hemphill also had a connect with Ellefson’s family, coaching dad Eric at PAHS in the early 1990s.

“I believed in Britt’s coaching,” Colby Ellefson said, recalling that first year.

As a sophomore, Ellefson raced to a 12th place finish in the 500 (5:19.14) and 15th in the 200 (1:56.95), and as a junior those placings and times got even better: he took eighth, and earned a place on the medal stand, in the 500 (5:16.55) and was 10th in the 200 (1:54.42).

‘Mental toughness’

Ellefson makes a good distance swimmer, Hemphill said, for a number of reasons: “It’s mental toughness. He’s a runner he’s a competitor, he’s smart, he’s coachable, [and he’s] willing to translate the idea of how you plan races into the actual race.”

He’s also determined, shrugging of some tough leg injuries during cross country and track seasons to stay in shape for swimming. (As timing would have it, he had a protective boot removed from such an injury during his junior year the day swim season started.)

Hemphill said injuries haven’t slowed the Sequim teen down at all.

“I asked him along the way … [but] he managed it well in cross country. This year, it was a non-factor. It had no affect — his training was spot on.”

Finishing strong

As a senior, a trio of Sequim high teammates — Jasper Flath, Adrian Osborne and Bowen Zhu — joined Ellefson on the Port Angeles team and got a chance to swim together as a relay at the district meet.

Ellefson also received an honor after being named a co-captain on the squad with Port Angeles’ Finn Thompson; they combined to qualify for districts in 13 individual events.

“That [captaincy] speaks to his integrity and character,” Hemphill said.

Sequim swimmers participating with the Port Angeles for the 2023-24 regular season include, from left, Colby Ellefson, Adrian Osborne, Jasper Flath and Bowen Zhu.

The RPT work and years of training paid off for Ellefson in his senior postseason — first at districts, where he edged Josh VanHuis of Kingston by 0.03 of a second to win the 200 free for his first district title, and added a second state berth with a 5:18.91 finish in the 500 free, just behind Kingston’s VanHuis.

And while his times were solid, Hemphill had the SHS senior holding back as they had planned.

“I love tapers; it’s as much art as it is science,” Hemphill said. “I told him, ‘Race great, but we didn’t do all this for districts.’”

A week later, Ellefson blasted past those times for two top-five finishes.

“The 200 was most unexpected, ‘[with] how much his speed was there,” Hemphill said.

And while it’s the end of Ellefson’s prep career, it’s also the end of Hemphill’s coaching career, he noted — 40 years after coaching high first high school team through state (Hazen High, who placed fourth that year).

Hemphill said he’ll miss coaching, but to be able to see Ellefson swim the 500 final to cap his coaching career was a great moment.

“Swimming never gets old,” he said.