The name’s Kouzmine, Dmitri Kouzmine.
The junior returned from Russia with a love for both swimming and academics that led him back to Evanston High School. Kouzmine’s contributions at the IHSA state meet Feb. 27-28 in the Wildkits’ pool could help the squad to its first team medal since the 2001 state championship.
Kouzmine swam at Evanston as a freshman, before his family moved back to its homeland because of his father’s business. The relocation to Moscow was expected to be permanent.
Kouzmine attended “a junior Olympic school meant to raise people for the Olympics.” The Cold War-era training site left the teenager occasionally shaken but never stirred.
“Hell. That’s the best one-word explanation for it,” he said. “We’d swim 10 miles every day, including Saturdays. Our coach gave us one set [of exercises] that we would do almost every day. It was really monotonous and really hard. And he would yell at us a lot. We basically swam for about seven hours a day counting the weights we did. I’d wake up, go to swimming, go to school, go to swimming, go to sleep. Period. That was it.”
The only way to get an A in swimming was to win a national championship. Kouzmine ranked third in several events but slipped to 11th at the Russian equivalent of the Junior Olympics. He got the equivalent of a B on his report card.
The situation in Russia was not to Kouzmine’s liking.
“It’s kind of hard to do both school and swimming there,” he said. “You’re basically forced to choose one of them. You go to a good school and you say you want to swim and they laugh at you. You go to do swimming and you say you want to go to a decent school and they laugh at you.”
So Kouzmine’s parents arranged for him to move back into their Evanston home. Grandparents are shuttled back and forth from Russia to run the house.
Kouzmine’s swimming career began in America. He was 7 when the family moved from Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia and third-largest city in Russia. He started swimming at age 10. One trait has served him well from the start.
“I started out really bad,” he said. “It’s just kind of stubbornness that got me the whole way. In practice, people would hate me because I would basically keep up with them, no matter what, even though I wasn’t that fast.
“Eventually I got to liking it a lot. It was the competitive aspect. There are very few things that can match the jolt of adrenaline when you get up on the box.”
As a freshman Kouzmine swam on a relay team that failed to place at the IHSA finals. He wants to do more in a return trip this year. He hopes to medal in the backstroke and individual medley, and in the relays.
“The state meet had a role in my return,” said Kouzmine, who won the Central Suburban League South backstroke title Feb. 14. “I’m hoping that I get good enough that I get top three in state somewhere. I can definitely help out my medley relay.”
Coach Kevin Auger said he believes Kouzmine is a difference-maker for the Wildkits.
“He gets in the water and trains very hard, and leads by example,” Auger said.
