<b>A Couple of American Patriots</b> - Indiana University Athletics

News Update

March 12, 2003

A Couple of American Patriots

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It was a meeting that would change both of their lives but it also begs the question, If Sara Reiling knew that her future husband was going to be in her Geography class four years ago, would she have still arrived with wet hair and wearing sweat pants?

A freshman at the time, Sara said Butch Hildebrand first caught her eye because of the Big Ten wrestling backpack he wore to class. She said it didn't take any time at all for her to also notice the senior wrestler's rugged good looks. "He's short but he's really bulky and his name is Butch," said Sara. "You've got to start with that."

All relationships have to start somewhere but the Reiling-Hildebrand courtship didn't quite proceed as Sara had planned. "It was horrible," she said. "He yelled at me in class one day. I was just trying to have a conversation with him and saw the backpack and said, 'Oh, you're a wrestler.' He turned around and snapped at me and said, 'That's what the bag says, doesn't it?' I was like, 'Whoa, okay. I'm just a little freshman, don't kill me here.' "

Sara said her eventual husband had no idea she was a diver and, to be honest, could have cared less. To him, she says, "I was the little girl that always came to class in her athletic sweats with her hair wet. I was the little athlete wanna-be."

Butch Hildebrand's recollection of the first meeting between the two jives with his wife's.

"I just remember her walking into class, usually dripping wet and always in sweats," he said. "I remember thinking to myself, 'That girl could be cute if she just took care of herself.' It wasn't until I saw her out in normal civilian attire that I found the first bit of attraction toward her."

At a party during the spring of 1999, Sara called Butch out. She told him he was mean. She told him he was a womanizer for degrading her. His friends laughed, realizing that this must be the girl with the wet hair and sweat pants that Butch had been talking about so much. That was the last hint Sara needed. The two began spending time together in April of 1999 and, by October, were as smitten with one another as a mosquito would be to a Mississippi swamp. It was then that Butch finally admitted that Sara Reiling was his girlfriend. It was three years later — on August 17, 2002, in Minneapolis - when Butch first called Sara his wife.

He is quick to say she is a devoted wife and mother of their two dogs, Butch's Coal (which according to Sara is a typical "prissy stubborn lab"), who is named because of its black color and because Butch's grandfather worked in a coal mine, and Sebastian (her Shitzu poodle). He also thanks her for everything she does for him and the dogs: keeping track of expenses, completing the majority of the housework (the only exception cooking), and for keeping things in order around their home.

Butch also talks about his wife's style and class, and about how she may very well be America's premier collegiate athlete in any sport.

On February 4 of this year — only six months into their fledgling marriage — Lance Corporal Lawrence D Hildebrand, computer communications specialist, USMC, left behind his home and family to board a plane hell bent for Camp Pendleton, California.

"Long distance is a hard thing to battle in a relationship," he said, "especially when that long distance has the possibility of becoming involvement in armed combat and the honest danger of loss of life. We both take it one day at a time but we rely on each other for strength when times get tough."

Prior to her senior year in high school, Sara too left her family in favor of California. She was determined to represent her country too.

REILING ON READING: "'IT'S GREAT, IT'S FUN', I HATE IT SO MUCH."

Math, along with reading, and even Spanish were becoming alarmingly difficult for the Cretin-Durham Hall sophomore. It was getting ridiculous and embarrassing. Sure, this is a prestigious private school in St. Paul, but should schoolwork really be this hard? Why was her answer to question number twelve 1024 when everybody else's was 1042?

She's flashing a look again that could easily be that of the next Olympic darling - the facial expression and personality Dorothy Hamill first patented before Mary Lou Retton infringed upon the copyright. Thousands of teenage boys watching the Olympics could have a crush on Sara, but she'll fight the racing hearts and blushed cheeks every step of the way. Sara Hildebrand only gives you a ninety-six percent look. She refuses to relinquish the final four percent, almost as to say, 'I'm not as good, or as pretty, or as smart as you think I am'; but she's all of those things. If she ever decides to give away the final four percentage points she's withholding, it will be her face that will grace a box of Wheaties in 2004.

What she doesn't hold back is her laugh. Hers is not a pixie giggle. It's a full-fledged belly rumble that bounces skyward as if on a catapult. She laughs, "It's funny that I go and promote reading with this Read Across America program because I hate reading. 'It's great, it's fun,' I tell the kids. But I hate (reading) so much."

She has an excuse for not wanting to plant her face in a book. As a sophomore in high school, it was determined that Reiling has dyslexia. It is not a severe case but when Spanish and math tests were returned, answers would be wrong. They'd be incorrect because she'd flip-flop answers. The number 775 might become 757. To this day, she flips the order of letters. She has difficulty adding or deleting letters out of words. Sara attributed her strong grade school education and her work ethci in the classroom as the reasons why it wasn't detected earlier (can you imagine having to read like that?). She believes that she overcompensated for the dyslexia but that it finally caught up with her.

"I went to a counselor and said, 'There's something wrong with how I'm perceiving things.' I needed to know what was going on. I brought it on because I was getting really frustrated. My teachers wouldn't do anything about it because I would write 42, not 24. They didn't know that I knew the right answer."

As a possible career path, Hildebrand intends to work with students with special needs. She is scheduled to begin student teaching this fall. Her aunt, Pat Coopman, who works with childeren with disabilities in an aquatics setting, opened her eyes to these individual's gifts. Sara helped her aunt and was fascinated with a little girl she worked with who was blind and almost completely deaf yet knew her way around the pool area. Reiling was impressed.

"Swimming is not an obstacle," she said, "you just have to come to it from a different angle than most people. It's the same with school. It took me a long time to be able to do things but I just had to come from a different way. Teachers would explain it one way and it wouldn't make sense. I would go home and work on it and work on it, my mom would help me, and it would finally come to me a different way. Being the way that I am, it isn't easier, but I have a different way of thinking versus other teachers."

If Sara decides to not work with children with special needs, she has another possible career pursuit. "I know somebody that has worked at the San Diego SeaWorld with the different whales and dolphins. I thought about that if we are residing in California. I could work in San Diego every day in those tanks. That would be fine with me. I'll jump off their noses."

Prior to her senior year of high school, Scott Smith, her diving coach at the time, decided to call it quits. She pondered several different options. She could dive one-meter at the high school level and hope that she caught the eye of an interested college coach. Another possibility was to wait until a coach was named to replace Smith, or she could move. Within a week, she began packing her bags. Reiling started classes in Minneapolis as a senior and during the first week of fall classes told everyone that she was leaving. Seven days later she walked into a house in Irvine, Calif., not even knowing the family that was willing to take her in.

Despite being a senior, Sara definitely felt like a freshman at Irvine High School.

"I'm trying to explain to people that I'm a senior and that I transferred. Nobody understood. The school was enormous. We were the largest class at Cretin with 320 and I go there and there is 740."

During her senior season, she was only at school for 2 1/2 hours per day, which was just long enough to stay enrolled. Her diving coach at the time, Janet Ely-Lagourgue, is now coaching in nearby Mission Viejo. Sara said the move was horrible but also a great experience.

"I had to learn a lot of self control," she said. "I had to understand that these people aren't out to get me and that I need to be nice. The stress of being away from home was hard, and I had to learn how to cope. All of that has come back to the pool, because now I know when I'm going to get mad. I just bite my lip, or turn away, or just go back under water for a minute."

The individual who would mean the most to Hildebrand's psyche was now waiting in the wings.

JUST WHAT THE DOCTOR ORDERED

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Dr. Jeff Huber is arguably the nation's premier diving coach. The five-time U.S. National Coach-of-the-Year, Indiana University's men's and women's diving coach has earned a well-deserved reputation for turning good divers into great ones and great talents into champions. Combine Hildebrand's ability with Huber's insight and you have diving's answer to Ginger and he Fred.

In 2003 alone, Huber was recognized as both the men's and women's coach-of-the-year in the Big Ten Conference, while Hildebrand was the Big Ten Diver-of-the-Year and Diver-of-the-Championships at the conference meet after pulling a rare triple - winning on 1-Meter, 3-Meter, and platform.

It hasn't always been pretty on the 10-meter platform. About the time she was a freshman in high school, at a qualifying meet held in Minneapolis that Huber and several of his Indiana divers attended, she crashed on a dive during practice two days prior to the platform event. She got up again and did it fine in the meet and then wiped-out on a different dive.

"I was in my learning-to-dive 10-meter stage," she says.

Huber was hooked. Even when she crashed and burned, she couldn't wait to get back on the board. Huber said she wasn't much of a diver at that stage but that he was thoroughly impressed by her determination. He says it's her drive that sets her apart, in addition to her gifts of tremendous balance and explosiveness. After flirtations with Miami (Fla.), Texas, and Tennessee, Reiling decided to call Bloomington her home and Huber her coach. To this day, she is impressed with Huber's psychology background - he holds a Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Nebraska — and cites that as being one of the most important factors in her development.

"While he knows how to coach me, and he knows what he is looking for technically as far as diving, I don't think a lot of coaches can get into the psychology part of it," she said. "Diving is not just how talented and athletically skilled you are. It's how well you can hold your head together and whether or not you can stay mentally within the game. He talks a lot about that stuff, and that's helped me more than I think I realize."

Huber's affinity for Hildebrand stems from the fact that she's, "just a really good person." While demanding of her and still respecting the coach-athlete relationship, the two are also friends. "She just doesn't take herself too seriously."

"I don't think there's ever a day she leaves the pool when she doesn't thank me," said Huber. "That's really rare."

In anticipation of the 2003 NCAA Women's Swimming and Diving Championships, which will be held at Auburn University from March 20-22, Huber is still tweaking several elements of Hildebrand's diving, including her entries. While this "tweaking" is akin to fixing a paint chip on an F-117 Stealth Fighter, IU All-America Marc Carlton has already noticed improvement in her diving. He says that Sara, who may very well have the most difficult dive list of any diver in the world, has always struggled with "ripping," which is when a dive makes a sharp rip sound as it goes through the water without any splash. He said that Huber has taken a new approach to teaching her how to rip and the new drills have resulted in improved entries. He said she has mastered the line-up drills, and now only has to apply the improved rip to her dives. "Once she does that," he says, "she will be an even stronger competitor than she already is. She will really be ahead of the competition." She is already the only woman in the United States, and possibly even the world, to perform a dive with a 3.6 degree-of-difficulty.

Hildebrand also credits Huber with the successful management of her time. She says the only way that she's able to practice as much as she does is Huber's effective juggling of their training schedules.

Huber cites the improvement of IU junior Cassandra Cardinell, who finished fourth on platform at the 2002 NCAA Championships, as another reason for Hildebrand's improvement as the Loudonville, N.Y., product pushes Sara daily. He believes the two together are leading contenders to represent the United States at the 2004 Olympics in synchronized diving. The funny thing is, when Hildebrand dives she spins in the opposite direction of almost every other diver. With Cardinell, it becomes almost a mirrored image, rather than pure synchronization. To alleviate this concern, the duo has adjusted their list of dives to minimize the mirrored action.

No matter the success, she doesn't see herself as being special. "I'm just an average person like everybody else. I just have a talent. Other people have talents in many other things they do."

Very few, however, can ever call themselves Olympians.

"REPRESENTING THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ..."

Every time she moved, the image followed. It was essentially a big six-by-six color shadow. During her first dive at the XXVII Olympiad in Sydney — an inward dive so she was facing the wall behind her and not the well a little over 32 feet below — she'd flinch, and the 36-square-foot color video screen would mimic her on about a two-to-three second delay. One of the first events to sell out at the Olympics, every seat was filled. We're not at Cooke Hall anymore, she thought.

Between dives, wearing her white terry-cloth robe with the block "USA" emblazoned on the back  she wears a similar one at competitions to this day  she doesn't look at her scores or those of her competitors. She says she's not superstitious, but instead only looks superstitious. Walking to her turn, she always removes her flip-flops at the same place on the pool deck. Generally, she kicks them off her feet and lets them slide across the water-slicked surface. She walks to the shower, where she stays for several minutes to get warm. She dries off and walks toward the hot tub. She takes some water out of the tub and puts it on her. It's warmer water that keeps her from getting cold. She walks back toward the board, jumps around a bit on the deck, does a couple of arm swings and several actions that relate to the upcoming dive, and she's ready to go. She throws her "Sammy" (essentially a small towel from which water is effectively squeezed only to be used again; think dry, wet, squeeze, dry again) from the board onto the same spot on the deck.

She wasn't even supposed to be there, maybe in 2004 but not in 2000. But there she is. Several days earlier she had a video camera plastered to her eye and entered the Olympic Stadium along with everybody's heroes. But now she was one of them too. She had shivers wrestling with chills, chills shouting at shivers, and goose bumps riding on top of both.

Sydney impressed her. She also enjoyed her two-day trip to Melbourne. In all, she and her teammates spent five weeks Down Under. She took time to dive too, finishing thirteenth. The perfectionist in her says, 'Not good enough.' The defense mechanism in her says, "If I go again, great, but I went once and I wasn't supposed to go. I just have to keep remembering that and pound it in my head. 'I've gone once it doesn't matter.' The couch potato in her (she swears she is one yet she hates watching television and falls asleep during movies) says, 'What more can I do? Do I really need to dive anymore.'

She's still diving for hours every day. Athens is screaming her name.

"WAITIN' FOR THE SOLDIER TO COME BACK AGAIN."

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She doesn't expect to have her travelin' soldier home before Christmas.

It's a highly protected area, she reassures herself, of Camp Pendleton in Southern California. At least he's here and not overseas. But it's still not home. Marc Carlton, her talented teammate, says that the week following her husband's deployment, "she told us all that it was going to be a difficult time for her. She warned us that is she seems moody or impatient, it's because she is stressed about Butch."

Carlton says that she seemed a little withdrawn from practice, but that she didn't let it affect her training. "She may tell you how difficult it is for her to be preoccupied about the possibility that Butch may be sent overseas, " he said, "but it certainly doesn't show. When she gets to practice, she's back to business as usual. That, to me, is pretty impressive."

Presently, she lives with the girlfriend of one of Butch's friends. She says she likes to be around people but prefers to be with two friends rather than twenty.

She's going to be busy during the coming year. This summer, there are three major international meets plus nationals. There is student teaching this fall. The American Cup will be in January 2004. There is a World Cup in Greece before the Olympics. The Olympic Trials are in St. Louis in June.

Between now and then, there are phone calls to be made and e-mails to be read. She says this is actually easier than going through boot camp, when she couldn't talk to Butch at all. She says letters work, but only to some degree.

"I don't want to say that I have enough other things in my life that I am preoccupied and don't need to worry about it. I fill my mind with enough other things that I don't think about the fact that he's not at home with me. It's hard, but I'm strong (She laughs, it was the full-fledged belly rumble again). He tells me every day, 'You're strong.'

She looks forward to making what she calls, "the famous drive to Minnesota," with her husband again. She sings in the car. When she stops, Butch will tell her to keep singing. Sara likes country because she says it's a little bit easier to sing.

"A lot of people like the guy singers, because, well, they're guys," she says. "They're like, 'Tim McGraw is so sexy.' I'm like, 'Yeah, but he's like 45- or 50-years old. Ya know, I don't know if I find that attractive.

"I like the Dixie Chicks. They have a song about a soldier. Everybody cries about it, but it's just like Butch."

One day soon, driving north on Interstate 94 somewhere between Madison and St. Paul, The Little One will scan the FM dial. She'll begin to sing and the traveling soldier will lean over, touch her shoulder, wipe a tear from her face, and tell her she's strong. She'll turn to look at him just in time to see the saltwater dripping from his eyes. She'll pause a second, and then she'll laugh, or she'll cry, or both; you take your pick.

Indiana University Athletics

A Couple of American Patriots

A Couple of American Patriots

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