Caeleb Dressel's long road from Green Cove Springs to Team USA and 2021 Tokyo Olympics

The wake-up calls came early for Caeleb Dressel.

From Green Cove Springs the standard path led northward onto United States Highway 17, a due-north arrow streaking alongside the St. Johns River through Fleming Island and then Orange Park, then onto Interstate 295, veering east, onto the Buckman Bridge and its eight screaming lanes. The first exit was San Jose Boulevard and he would take it, turning north again, hugging the river through Mandarin and Beauclerc, turning left into the Bolles School entrance and plunging into the Uible Pool as the clock struck five.

That was still long before sunrise, and after an hour in the pool, maybe an hour and a half, he would climb back from the water, scurry to the car and reverse course, brave the Buckman again as the maddening rush hour began, return to Green Cove Springs, turn into Clay High School, find a parking spot and dash into the classroom in time for first period.

Then, a school morning and afternoon later, back to the car, back to the road and back to the bridge, back to Bolles, training outside and inside the pool, nearly twice the length of the first session, then onto the road again, returning home, finishing up homework — there were Advanced Placement classes on that schedule — and preparing to do it all again.

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Multiply that effort times day after day after day, times four years.

The result is the fastest sprinter in the world of water.

From Green Cove Springs all the way to Tokyo, the course has been a long and memorable one to date for Caeleb Dressel, the Clay High School graduate who now enters this month's Olympics as the new face of men's swimming in the United States.

"He's such a good guy, from a great family, you kind of forget he's at that [swimming] level," said Justin Faulkner, Dressel's high school swimming coach at Clay. "It's really, truly wild to think, in just days, he will be the water-cooler conversation around the world."

Already in possession of numerous records at world championships, Dressel now has the chance to stamp his mark on the Olympic history books as well.

But the path to fame and fortune at the Olympics might never have attained its full speed without his thousands of hours of practice in the Uible Pool with the Bolles Sharks team, where he weathered a punishing schedule that would have deterred a multitude of teenagers.

"I knew then he had a chance to become an Olympian, if he did the right things," said Jason Calanog, his former coach with the Bolles Sharks club and now assistant coach at Texas A&M.

Strong self-discipline

For Faulkner, the story starts with a bark.

Long before Dressel raced his first high school lap, the Clay teacher and coach had known the swimmer's family for years, going back to taking his dog — Lucy, a boxer bulldog, now 14 years old — for veterinary treatment with Mike Dressel, Caeleb's father.

That's how he first learned about the swimmer who would rewrite Green Cove Springs' athletic history.

"They gave him this really strong sense of self-discipline," Faulkner said.

The four Dressel siblings took to the pool, one after the other. Tyler was the oldest, earning All-First Coast honors as a senior in 2009. Then came Kaitlyn, a Florida High School Athletic Association champion herself in the 100-yard freestyle on her way to swimming at Florida State University and racing the U.S. Olympic Trials in 2012 and 2016.

By the time Caeleb's turn came up, his physical conditioning and pure speed instantly made him a swimmer to watch.

"His times at 9 were the same as some of my high school swimmers," said Faulkner, now the principal of Green Cove Springs Junior High School. "There was no competition for him at that level."

Back during those teenage years, Dressel was among a group of roughly 20 to 30 swimmers — the numbers could fluctuate — who made up what was described as the "late-night" swimming group at Bolles.

The first splash could be 5 a.m. The day's last was around 7:30 at night. In between came school, and those drives, and those experiences that forged good into great.

"He was always a special talent, probably one of the top five [young swimmers] in the United States in a lot of different events," Calanog recalled. "But he's still 14, 15 years old, and it's a matter of seeing whether he wanted to become a really great swimmer."

Dressel did — and he showed it, enduring a training regimen that few teenagers could stomach.

That back-and-forth between Green Cove Springs and Bolles was a constant — Dressel spent close to 20 hours each week in swimming practice, with nearly as much in transit between school and the pool.

He set the alarm clock early for the early-morning sessions, from about 5 a.m. to 6:30 a.m., on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Regular practice was five days a week, 4:45 to 7:30 p.m., first with dry-land training and then countless laps in the pool.

Even the weekends weren't free: Dressel returned to the pool for the Saturday morning drills, 7 to 10 a.m.

"Whenever he was having a bad day, that's when he worked his hardest, whether it was a day when he had a lot of homework or wasn't feeling super motivated," Calanog said.

Swimming with the Bolles Sharks meant more than just practice: Dressel also competed in multiple regional and national competitions, setting a still-intact national junior relay record alongside Ryan Murphy, Joseph Schooling and Santo Condorelli. Three Olympic champions and a two-time finalist: It may have been the greatest relay quartet in the history of American youth swimming, and as the times dropped, the expectations grew.

"We were talking about them being great later in 2016, definitely in 2020," said Calanog.

That intensive schedule carried on with few interruptions — Dressel spent several months away from the pool during the winter of 2013-14, but returned to the water later that spring on his way to starting his college career at the University of Florida.

Within the late-night class, Dressel formed a subgroup along with his younger sister, Sherridon, as well as fellow Clay High swimmers like Grady Heath and Dakota Mahaffey. All became future Gators. 

"They all kind of bonded from being on the other side of the river," Calanog recalled.

Calanog's class in those years also included a multiple state breaststroke champion in Creekside's Meghan Haila. And while she and Dressel ended up on opposite ends of the Florida-Florida State divide — she signed to swim for the Seminoles — that didn't drive them apart. They were married this winter, on Valentine's Day weekend.

Often, the Clay swimmers carpooled together — once Caeleb got his driver's license, the group would cover that Clay-to-Bolles-to-Clay-to-Bolles-to-Clay route day in, day out.

And, yes, between the drives, there was school, and it wasn't easy.

"It was amazing just how consistently they made it to school," said Faulkner, who also taught Dressel's first-period classes in his two seasons — classes like Advanced Placement Literature and Composition, far from light material after an early-morning alarm and hours in the pool and car.

Dressel was making an impact at his school, too, in some prime years for Clay sports:

The Blue Devils qualified for the FHSAA football championship in 2013, while their baseball squad included current Texas Rangers pitcher Dane Dunning.

"We were placing second at the state in Class 2A with five kids [qualifying], which is pretty amazing," said Clay swimming coach Carol MacDougall.

The impact from Dressel's days of youth swimming, though, goes beyond the trophies in the cabinet, or the records on the board.

"You sometimes see kids in that [athletic] box, and they get really tight or socially awkward, because they don't have that outlet," Faulkner said. "But he was gregarious, well-liked, fun to be around."

For teachers, coaches and teammates alike, Dressel left an impact in Green Cove Springs, one that didn't fade away after he began to attain swimming celebrity status.

In late 2015, longtime Clay math teacher Claire McCool — she taught Dressel's geometry and statistics classes in high school — was diagnosed with breast cancer.

When it came time for Dressel to race the SEC Championships for the Gators that season, he plunged into the water with her name written on his face.

Afterward, he sent her his SEC medal from the 100-yard freestyle final.

In the club pool, meanwhile, Calanog still remembers Dressel for his work to help younger swimmers develop their skills in the sport. 

"He was trying to break junior world records, and he was still helping out these high school kids," Calanog said. "He'd teach them techniques, the mental aspects of swimming. He was a great mentor. He might be the fastest in the world, but he's still humble, and his family has done a great job of that."

From Green Cove to the stars

Fire up the map application and plug in the route — Green Cove to Bolles and back, morning and afternoon — and the result comes to about 100 miles. 

Now, those interminable road trips have won Dressel a trip to a destination too distant for any bridge.

In Tokyo, where Northeast Florida has already attained Olympic gold through the track feats of Bob Hayes in 1964, Dressel is now chasing Olympic gold, one year later than he expected.

Along with Murphy, he now stands out as the face of American men's swimming — both Bolles Sharks teammates were voted captains of the USA Swimming squad — and the sport's shoulder, too, instantly recognized for the massive eagle tattoo running up and down his left arm.

NBC, among others, is banking on it. By now, the commercials are ubiquitous: Dressel cannonballing into the water while surrounded by the Minion characters from the Despicable Me movie series in the network's promotional campaign for the Olympics.

A giant of the Games. Like Michael Johnson in Atlanta in 1996. Or Michael Phelps in Beijing in 2008. 

"You see him now on the commercials," Faulkner said, "and he's the exact same Caeleb as at 14, 15, 16, 17."

Dressel missed out on the medals in Rio de Janeiro in his one individual event, the 100 free, when he placed sixth. But he brought home two golds in the relays, the 4x100 free and the medley relay, and that began the momentum toward the two subsequent world championships that really launched him to the top of the sport.

In 2017, Dressel won seven gold medals — three individual and four relay — at the FINA championships in Budapest, Hungary. Two years later, he took down another record with eight medals, including six golds, in Gwangju, South Korea. On both occasions, FINA named him the male swimmer of the meet.

Speaking with the Times-Union for a feature last fall on his preparation for the Olympics, Dressel cited those world championships as finding a "sweet spot" in his connection with U.S. Olympic coach and former Bolles School coach Gregg Troy.

"I started swimming at the age of 5, and to see that come together and to finally see myself reach the potential I thought I was always capable of becoming, it was nice," Dressel said.

Even during 2020, when COVID-19 shoved his Olympic dream one year into the future, Dressel showed the world he's still the man to beat. Spending a month inside a virtual bubble in Hungary, he won MVP honors in the International Swimming League team competition.

Try to calculate the medals that Dressel could win in Tokyo, and it's a bit like a trip back to those math classrooms at Clay.

Dressel won the U.S. Olympic Trials in the 50 free, the 100 free and the 100 fly (the 50 fly, a favored Dressel specialty from the world championships, is not contested at the Olympics). So, x = 3.

But then add on the 4x100 free relay and the medley relay, both of which he swam and won at the 2016 Games, and x starts to climb.

There's also a chance he could swim the 4x200 relay, at least in its preliminary round — Dressel posted the second-best time in the heats at that distance in Olympic Trials.

And, for the first time, the IOC is adding a mixed medley relay (two men, two women) to the schedule. Dressel swam that relay at the world championships, joining his longtime friend and teammate Murphy as well as Lilly King and Simone Manuel.

At least in theory, he has a shot to match the seven golds attained by Mark Spitz at Munich in 1972. That was the mark long thought unsurpassable until Phelps brought home eight in 2008, the same week Dressel turned 12. 

Dressel won't swim enough events to surpass that gold medal count in these Olympics. But he already has seized a record from Phelps' grasp, when he swam 49.50 in the 100 fly in Gwangju.

"It was amazing [in 2008]. Michael Phelps was the talk of every household," Faulkner said. "Now to think years down the road that he's that caliber, it's awesome. I almost forget about the magnitude of what it really is. I get goosebumps."

Goosebump time is almost here. So are the wake-up calls.

Only this time, because of the 13-hour time difference between Florida and Tokyo, it will be the turn of Dressel's supporters on the First Coast and elsewhere to set their alarms — many Olympic swimming sessions will open at 6 a.m. Eastern — to watch him in action.

For the chance to see this young swimmer again, now grown up and challenging the whole planet, it's well worth it.

"He may be the greatest swimmer in the world," Calanog said, "but I still see him as the 14-year-old kid that I was coaching."