On Tuesday evening, two of the most accomplished athletes in Mike Parratto‘s life has reached the peak.
Around 7:57 that evening, Parratto was sitting in the stands at the Allen Jones Aquatic Center in Knoxville, Tennessee. His daughter Jessica, alongside her diving partner Delaney Schnell, had just completed a dominant sixth round in the women’s synchronized platform diving event and was heading to the Paris Olympics. About 40 minutes later, Mike Parratto walked to the other side of the building and opened the Peacock app on his phone (which he made sure was loaded between sessions for this very purpose) to look Regan Smith compete in the women’s 100 backstroke final at the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials. Smith, who Parratto coached from 2015 to 2021 at Riptide Swim Club in Lakeville, Minnesota, broke the world record in that event to earn her first world record in five years.
Jessica Parratto and Smith, at two very different stages of their careers, took two very different paths to make their respective Paris Olympic teams. But connecting them both was a man who played an important role in both of their lives, proud of it all.
“For me, watching (Jessica’s) diving and Regan’s swimming, it was very rewarding to see all the hard work they put in,” Mike Parratto said.
Jessica Parratto, currently 29, became a three-time Olympian on Tuesday. Already a silver medalist at the Tokyo 2021 Olympics with Schnell, she chose to retire from the sport shortly after to pursue a professional career as a healthcare recruiter, assisting nurses in the emergency room. To take this position, she left her training base at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
However, in early 2023, Schnell contacted Parratto and managed to convince her to return to diving. Because diving involved at least four to five hours of training per day, Parratto could no longer work full time and returned to Bloomington. The duo won bronze in platform synchro at the 2023 World Championships and are now ready to defend their Olympic medal.
“From my point of view, she felt like she wasn’t finished,” Mike Parratto said. “There’s always that love for the sport and coming back and seeing how good you can be.”
Meanwhile, Smith is only 22 years old, but she’s already been through a lot in her young career. After breaking the 100 and 200 backstroke world records under Mike Parratto 2019 at the age of 17, she faced a mental block and struggled to replicate those times over the next four years. In 2021, she left Riptide to swim at Stanford University, but paused her college career a year later to train at Arizona State for Bob Bowman as a pro. After two years with Bowman, she finally started setting fastest backstroke times again.
Three years later, Parratto returns to the Tokyo Olympic cycle, where it had all its momentum after 2019. He felt it was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which delayed the Olympics by a year and disrupted the four-year plan they had planned. had created a project together which was to extend from 2016 to 2020. In addition, their access to the swimming pool during the pandemic became limited.
“I hate to use COVID as an excuse, but to some extent it was,” Parratto said. “You need to come up with another one-year plan to continue. Some of the training we had been doing became less than in the past, so there was no double training.
However, Parratto can now step back and know that everything worked out in the end, even if it took a while.
Parratto and Smith stay in touch, as Smith still sends Parratto the sets she does with Bowman. But that doesn’t mean he’s looking over his shoulders – Parratto believes Bowman is the ideal coach for Smith.
“The training Bob (Bowman) does is for (Smith),” Parratto said. “She’s in a situation where she’s training with (the best in the world), medalists…and of course she’s doing a long course whenever they decide to train in a long course. So all of those factors made it all work, and that was a big help to him.
The experiences of training an elite athlete and educating an athlete may seem like two very different things. However, Parratto approaches both actions with a similar mindset: simply being supportive and letting the athletes make their own life decisions.
Parratto is a little more discreet around Jessica, given that his wife Amy is a diving coach who coached their daughter when she was a child. And although he designed sets for Smith and guided her in the past, he then allowed her to be responsible for her own major career choices. Now that Smith is gone with Bowman, he’s sitting back and enjoying how his career is going.
“As a parent, as a person, you want the best for them. You want to do what’s good for them,” Parratto said. “That includes letting them make their own decisions. It must be their decision. You can’t want it more than them, it’s their thing. Whether it’s Jessica or Regan, they decide what they want.
“A relationship has to be a little more than ‘here’s the training’. It’s working with someone. Track and field can be very emotional, as we saw here this week during the trials. It’s a lifetime of training. It takes a lot of time and effort. And the process is really, really important. And as a coach, or even as a parent, you participate in this process with them.
After Tuesday night’s diving session ended, the Parratto family went to dinner to celebrate Jessica Parratto’s Olympic berth and her birthday, which falls on June 26. Mike Parratto slept for an hour and a half, then flew to Indianapolis Wednesday morning to support his former and current swimmers at the Olympic trials. As long as he remains in the world of sports, he will be able to witness incredible things from the people in his life – as he did when he became an eight-time Olympic gold medalist. Jenny Thompson, as he did with Smith and as he did with his own daughter. But few moments in his life, at least those related to athletics, will match that forty-minute duration Tuesday night.