Music, engineering and swimming: Charlotte’s nationally ranked Norvin Clontz can do it all

Norvin Clontz always felt comfortable in the water.

Roughly six months after he was born, his family had a party at their backyard pool in Charlotte. Clontz, an energetic baby, kept jumping up and down while family members dipped their feet in the pool, and his mother ran inside to find him a swim diaper.

But before she even made it back down the stairs, her six-month-old son had made his way into the pool.

Clontz, a junior at Charlotte Latin and a U.S. Junior National Team member, had a feel for the water before his first birthday. The top-five recruit in the Class of 2025 has become a national standout and will swim at the University of California, which has won the past two NCAA men’s swimming and diving championships.

“I just can’t keep away from it,” Clontz said after a recent practice at Mecklenburg Swim Association. “For how young I am, I feel like I know stuff from old meets that a lot of people my age wouldn’t know. Like Kieren Perkins, (Aleksandr) Popov? I know all their best times and all the meets they’ve won. Because I love watching technique, and applying it in the pool to myself.”

Clontz swims for Charlotte Latin, which won its 19th state championship last year, in addition to his club team at MSA. The Hawks compete in the CISAA conference championship meet Thursday at Mecklenburg County Aquatic Center in uptown.

He loves his sport. But he’s always heard that it’s important to have a physical hobby, a creative hobby and an educational hobby, and maintain a good balance between them.

Clontz, who plans to study engineering at Cal and is passionate about STEM subjects, has always loved music. He’s played the violin, trombone, saxophone, piano, guitar and bass throughout his life, and still plays the piano and guitar regularly.

“Nobody ever taught him how to play the piano,” said his mother, Iva Clontz. “He will go and play the Moonlight Sonata just by ear. It was all self-taught. He will listen to music on YouTube, then just take the instrument and start playing it.”

As a freshman at Latin, Clontz realized the toll that being a top swimmer could take. He remembers feeling burned out and soon saw himself slow up in practice.

It didn’t take him long to snap out of that funk. In addition to focusing more on music, which accentuated his hobbies for playing piano and guitar that he hopes to continue into college, he started watching more movies during his free time. It helped him to go to bed thinking about a good part in a movie instead of a way to perfect his swimming strokes.

Clontz follows NCAA swimming closely and remembers watching Cal beat Texas in the 2022 national championship in Atlanta.

He traveled to Irvine, Calif., that summer and won the 400-meter freestyle at the junior nationals. He posted a time of 3:50.82, which broke the American record for 15-year-old swimmers.

That same week, he also competed in the Phillips 66 National Championships, which had him racing for 10 straight days. He remembers feeling worn out and just wanting to sit on his hotel bed and eat Oreos all day afterward.

Even though it would be a roughly seven-hour trip, his mother wanted to drive up to the Bay Area with him and visit Stanford and Cal. He knew which schools were the top NCAA swimming teams, but strolls around Queens University of Charlotte for swim camps were as much as visiting a campus as Clontz had done at that point.

Like many prospective college athletes, Clontz felt at home immediately when he stepped foot on Cal’s campus. He’d loved seeing Stanford — a prestigious institution and beautiful campus — but felt Berkeley “clicked way differently.”

“You could just see that click,” Iva Clontz said about the initial visit to Cal. “He kind of knew it. He’s really excited about Cal.”

Clontz, who also took visits to Florida and N.C. State, can “geek out” over the world championships and other national and international swimming events. Even though he’d felt he wanted to go somewhere farther away than Raleigh, he eventually made a visit after his initial hour-and-a-half conversation with the Wolfpack’s distance coach was filled with tangents about historic swim meets.

He often catches himself going on YouTube and watching clips of old races, or studying previous race results on the World Aquatics website. He finds himself revising an Excel spreadsheet on his iPad with all his goal splits, best events and goal times.

Compartmentalizing his interests in swimming, engineering and music has been instrumental in Clontz’s success, especially in high school.

“I’ve had trouble going to bed the last few months, trials coming up, so I keep running through scenarios in my head,” he said. “I just imagine deep sleep black. Then I’ll try, and I’ll just think about swimming. It’s been hard, but it’s just being mature about it, and not trying to eat it up all at once.

“Don’t inhale all the swimming you can when you’re just trying to pace yourself mentally and physically. Portion your life out to those three aspects of your daily routine.”

Clontz had primarily been a breaststroker through eighth grade. During the summer before his freshman year of high school, he remembers watching freestyle Olympian greats Ian Thorpe and Sun Yang, and decided he’d rather strive to be the fastest swimmer at the fastest stroke — than a fast swimmer with a slower-moving stroke.

He ramped up his freestyle training, spending about nine straight months solely working on that stroke, and eventually set the record in the 400-meter race for kids his age. That September, he wrote an essay about that triumph in English class.

In eloquent words, he described how he felt moving through the water in the intensity of that moment.

But when he turned around, saw the swimmers he’d beaten and realized the record he’d broken, he was already onto the next thing.

“That moment when he turned around, he didn’t look at the fact that he was first and beat all those really fast junior kids,” his mother said. “He did not see the fact that he beat the pool record. In his mind, and I didn’t know this until I read the essay, he was like, ‘oh, I’m 10 seconds off the world record.’”

Clontz’s family continued getting him in the water after his aunt let him into the water without a swim diaper at that pool party.

He took 20-minute one-on-one lessons at Charlotte Swim Academy until he was 5 years old. Charlotte Christian School had a summer program at its pool, and that was the first swim team Clontz joined.

Clontz won the first race in which he ever swam. It was a freestyle race, and he got a blue “First Place” ribbon.

He already had a feel for the water, and with his first victory, there began a feel for racing.

Key prep swimming dates

Thursday-Saturday: NCHSAA regionals

Feb. 7-10: NCHSAA swimming/diving state finals, Raleigh

Monday, Feb. 12: NCISAA D2 and D3 state swim finals, Greensboro

Tuesday, Feb. 13: NCISAA D1 state finals, Charlotte