After the 2022 NCAA Championships, Danny Kovac retired from swimming. He had just completed his college career at the University of Missouri and didn’t want to continue beyond that, opting not to use the extra COVID-19 year he was granted from competing during the 2020-21 season.
“I thought I was done for good,” Kovac said. “I had some other things that I really wanted to accomplish in my life.”
After graduation, Kovac moved to Kansas City, Missouri and started working a job with the U.S. military. However, after running into some difficulties with his professional career, he contemplated returning to the sport that he’d been doing all his life. When mulling through that decision in the fall of 2023, there was one man he knew to contact: SMU men’s swimming head coach Greg Rodenbaugh.
Rodenbaugh was the one who originally recruited Kovac to Missouri, and coached him in his freshman season as the head coach for Tigers. However, he left for SMU before the 2019-20 season, and Mizzou was led by Andrew Grevers for the rest of Kovac’s time there. But Rodenbaugh still kept in contact with Kovac, and encouraged him to come back to swimming.
“[Rodenbaugh] was like, ‘You should absolutley give it a shot, because you can’t do this forever,’” Kovac said. “But he was like, ‘you need to, like, figure out some real training.’”
When Kovac called Rodenbaugh, he had been out of the water since his retirement. But the SMU coach had successfully convinced him to come use his COVID-19 extra year to swim for his university. Later on, he even decided to attend SMU as a grad student to obtain his masters degree.
Kovac moved from Kansas City to Dallas midway through the 2023-24 NCAA season, and started competing for SMU in January 2024. Initially, he worried about what his teammates would think of his return, coming to swim with the team mid-season after being out of the sport for a year. However, things ended up working out just fine for him.
“The guys were awesome, really phenomenal team,” Kovac said. “And to get to train with Nic Fink ever day, what more can you ask for? The guy is incredible.”
Despite taking a year off from swimming, Kovac still made it back for his fourth career NCAA championship meet. At 2024 NCAAs, he finished 23rd in the 100 fly (45.17), 12th in the 200 fly (1:41.17), and ninth in the 200 IM (1:41.41)., setting season-bests in the latter two events. Three months later, he competed at the 2024 U.S. Olympic trials. He started off by first beating Benjamin Cono in a swim-off for the final spot in the men’s 100 breaststroke semifinals, and then finished 14th in the actual semi-finals. At the meet, he dropped over a second off his best time, going from 1:01.66 to 1:00.80.
The 100 breast isn’t an event that Kovac typically swims at big meets, but he took up the event for fun after training together with Nic Fink, the United States’ current top-ranked 100 breaststroker who swims for SMU’s pro group.
“I get to train with Nic [Fink] all the time and talk a lot of smack when we do breaststroke sets together,” Kovac said. “So I was like, ‘I’ve got to back this up a little bit,’ and had some goals in the event. Kept it super light, super fun — just out here having a good time.”
Kovac still has the 100 fly left to swim — an event that he notably placed fourth in at Olympic trials in 2021. But after that, his comeback will finally come to an end. He plans on swimming throughout the summer, and will retire for a second time afterward and continue working the job he started after graduating from Missouri. When all is said and done though, coming back was a decision that he doesn’t regret.
