Gerardo Gonzalez Ruiz, acting head coach for Rowan Women’s Swimming, looked out the window next to his seat on a plane over Erie, Pennsylvania. Gonzalez Ruiz, who began his trip in Mexico City, saw Erie from above and thought to himself, “Okay, not bad. We can do this. There’s still stuff to do around here.”

The only problem? He didn’t know that Erie was not the destination. A car picked him up from the airport, and the driving began. They passed some cows on a farm. Then another farm. And another.

“After I saw the first farm, I was like, ‘What is going on?’,” said Gonzalez Ruiz. “Then I saw a couple of cows, or a couple of chickens. I was like, ‘Wow, where am I going? What is this? I don’t think I’m gonna last here.’”

“Here” was Edinboro University, one of the schools that responded when Gonzalez Ruiz put out an all-call to colleges, trying to get recruited to swim in the United States. It was a late effort during his senior year of high school, but he didn’t know much about the recruiting process, being an international student.

That list of schools he went after including Arizona State and head coach Bob Bowman, who was Michael Phelps’ longtime coach. He didn’t hear back, but it didn’t discourage him.

“[Leon] Marchand was there, you know, all those greats,” said Gonzalez Ruiz. “Crazy program. I said, ‘You know what? I’m gonna send my email. I want to send my times. I’m gonna, you know, introduce myself and see what I get.’ Nothing came out of it, but I like to shoot my shot. And then Edinboro replied, and the head coach told me, ‘Hey, it’s kind of late, I can offer this scholarship. Yes or No?’ I said, ‘You know what? Let’s do it. Why not?”

 Gonzalez Ruiz didn’t just “last” at Edinboro, he “fell in love with the place.” He never wanted to leave. The COVID-19 pandemic came around during his sophomore year, which gave him an extra year of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) eligibility. However, the school did not offer an academic program, a Master of Business Administration (MBA), that he was looking for.

“I actually fell in love with Edinboro so badly that I wanted to stay there for my fifth year, but they didn’t have the program that I wanted, so that didn’t work out,” said Gonzalez Ruiz. “And that was like the perfect opportunity to go somewhere else.”

He found Fresno Pacific University in Fresno, California, as his option. In that fifth and final season, Gonzalez Ruiz earned all-conference honors in the Pacific Collegiate Swim and Dive conference. On senior day, standing on the pool deck, he started to realize that the transition from swimmer to “swammer” was about to begin.

He thought something that had never crossed his mind before, and immediately blurted it out: “I would like to be a coach.”

“And one other coach overheard that conversation,” said Gonzalez Ruiz. “He came up to me and said, ‘If you want to start coaching, I have a little position for you if you want to do it.’ So I said, ‘Yes, why not start coaching?’”

In California, he worked tirelessly. While he was assisting at Fresno Pacific, he was also working as an assistant at Buchanan High School in Clovis, California, and working on the club swimming scene as well.

“I was on deck probably, like, six hours, seven hours a day, probably sometimes eight, you know, we had meets and whatnot,” he said. “And honestly, I loved it. One coach once told me, don’t chase the bag, chase the dream. And I have fallen in love with that. I’m not doing this for the money, I am actually really passionate about it.”

That hard work earned Gonzalez Ruiz a chance to move once again, this time to Florida. He got a job coaching at the University of Florida Swim Camp, a summer program for swimmers ages 8-18.

The major plus? Florida’s campus in Gainesville is a hub for top-level swimmers to do their summer training, and Gonzalez Ruiz would have a chance to be around it. His boss during the camp was Annie Lazor, a bronze medalist in the 2020 Olympic Games.

Another Olympian in women’s swimming was around the pool deck often in Gainesville, and it was Katie Ledecky, who’s widely considered the greatest women’s swimmer of all time. Ledecky trains at the University of Florida in the summer, and Gonzalez Ruiz had opportunities to grab a stopwatch and keep times for her.

“That was a crazy experience,” Gonzalez Ruiz said. “Aside from being great in the water, they’re amazing people. One time, one of their coaches, Alex, invited us over to one practice. It was going to be good stuff. You wanted to be there. I always have my stopwatch on me. We show up, and he goes, ‘Hey, help us out. Take some splits. Take some time.’ I’m like, ‘Dude, you want me to take splits for Katie Ledecky, Bobby Fink, and Josh Liendo?’ World Champions, Olympians, and whatnot. And you’re only out there with the stopwatch, you don’t want to mess it up.”

He didn’t mess up taking times, but he did find himself walking into a legendary conversation one day.

“I was on deck, and one of my supervisors, she was like, ‘Go get something from the office, and we need it real quick,’” Gonzalez Ruiz said. “So, you know, I want to make a good impression, so I’m hustling to get there. I opened this door, and I see [Coach Anthony Nesty], Katie Ledecky, and Caleb Dressel just having a little chat. They look at me because I opened the door, and they’re like, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ I’m like, ‘Hey, sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.’ And I just kept walking. Got my thing, walked out. I was like, ‘Was that real?’”

Another day, it was Ryan Lochte, a six-time gold medalist spanning four Olympic Games.

“I’m telling the kids, like, what we are going to do today, and he walks in,” [Lochte] said. “I’m like, okay, we need to pause. You know he’s gonna say something. He says hi to the kids, amazing guy,” Gonzalez Ruiz said. “And then I’m shocked, you know, I can’t move. I’m just looking at him. He gets closer to me, grabs my shoulder. He says, ‘Hey, what’s up?’, walks out. You never think you’re going to be in that place, right? You get to that place that tells you you’re making it. Little wins, I call them little wins.”

Once his time as a camp coach ended in Florida, Gonzalez Ruiz headed back home.

Back home, he was applying for jobs, “shooting his shot” just like he did in high school, trying to find a college home. 

Elise Fisher replied to his email to Rowan right away, and Gonzalez Ruiz was thrilled. He felt a great connection after an initial Zoom meeting. Soon enough, he was heading back to Florida to retrieve his car from a friend’s and drive it up to New Jersey.

The only issue was that he had no place to stay. The solution? One of his best friends from swimming back at Edinboro lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, an hour and 39 minutes from Rowan’s campus.

For a while, he was commuting those 99 minutes back and forth every day. That was until mid-September of this past fall, when he found himself a place in South Jersey.

Since those last-minute emails during senior year of high school, it’s been all gas, no brakes for “Coach G” as he’s known through Rowan’s program. By his own recognition, it’s not easy for him to fall in love with anything. But once he does, he’s all in.

“I have always been pretty passionate about whatever I do,” said Gonzalez Ruiz. “For me, it’s really hard to fall in love with something, and then once I fall in love with something,  I want to go after it. I’m going to shoot my shot. If I hit, great. If I miss, I can try again. That’s what I do with the emails, for example, when applying for jobs. That’s what I did with all the emails when I was looking for a college. I just fall in love with what I do, and I continue going until I can’t.”

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