Junior at Fossil Ridge High School Carter Ruthven has decided to go to University of Kentucky for swimming and  academics. He made this decision Wednesday, October 27 and he has a lot to say about what got him to that point and some tips he has about getting recruited by colleges.

Ruthven was highly recruited by many colleges. Ruthven is no longer in the recruiting process after he accepted the offer from University of Kentucky Wednesday night. 

“ I love the team at Kentucky and the coaching staff is great,” Ruthven said. 

Ruthven talked to ten colleges on a  consistent basis and got three offers from Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Utah. He also looked at LSU and Alabama. Ruthven went on two recruit trips to Kentucky and  Wisconsin. 

 “I’m looking for a great team culture, a good coaching staff and just a fun atmosphere on campus,” Ruthven said. “Colleges, obviously they look for times and they look for improvement rate. And once you start calling them they look at your professionalism.” 

Some more advice he gives is to just answer their calls on time and stay updated with them.

The first thing he did to get to the point he’s at is to simply just train. This sounds a lot easier than it is because as a swimmer you  have  to train everyday and most of  the  time twice a day. When it comes to training it’s a lot more than just swimming back and forth for laps, it’s more about the time that you are holding during those laps and the distance per stroke. 

“I swim two to four hours everyday. And I lift three times a week.” Ruthven said.

Ruthven has  been swimming since he was 5 years old and has followed some sort of training regiment up to and beyond the point he is at. 

“It may seem like it will get easier for me but that just is not true because the training will get harder and it will be harder to drop time,” Ruthven said. 

Ruthven’s favorite part of swimming is training with his friends everyday and working  hard with the  team. Ruthven’s best event is  the  200 fly and his favorite is the 100 fly. Ruthven got his first Juniors Nationals  cut which is a couple seconds slower than Olympic trials  as a Sophomore or when he was 15 years old. He got the cut in the 100 Fly.  Ruthven swam on Fossil’s  swim team last year and  went to state. At state he scored 35.5 points and got 3rd in the 100 fly and 7th in the 50 free.

Ruthven will compete in the Junior National meet this coming December and is looking forward to improving more before heading to Kentucky at the end of 2023.