When the 2023 Patriot League Swimming & Diving Championships return to Bucknell’s Kinney Natatorium next week, Bison fans will get their final look at one of the top men’s sprint freestylers in school history. Senior Leo Kuyl, the reigning Patriot League runner-up in the 50-yard freestyle and the school record-holder in both the 50 and 100, will be looking to go out with a bang in his final conference championship meet.
While many of the followers of the program recognize Leo’s name from his numerous event victories or from the Kinney record board, where he displaced the legendary Jim Harvey atop the 100 free chart last season, but like most Bucknell student-athletes there is so much more to the person than just the numbers and accolades.
For example, fans may not know that Leo grew up in a bilingual household, or that he also has an older brother who was also a record-setting college swimmer, or that he aspires to swim in the 2024 Olympics, or even that his environmental geosciences major has taken him to Alaska for a research project.
Leo hails from New Paltz, New York, located in Ulster County about 80 miles north of New York City. His parents, Pierre and Patricia, are natives of Belgium, and after eight years living in Japan, work brought them to the New York area in the late 1990s. The Kuyls started a family here, with Leo the youngest of the three children behind sister Morgane and brother Emile.
The Kuyl siblings all grew up speaking French around the house with their parents, and then of course learned English through school, friends, and American culture.
Emile became quite the swimmer in his own right, earning 19 Division III All-America certificates and a First Team Academic All-America honor at Johns Hopkins from 2015-19. He still holds the Blue Jays' school record in the 100 backstroke.
Leo also competed in soccer and track & field in high school, but Emile served as an impetus for pursuing swimming at the next level.
“We have a bit of an age gap, so when we were younger he was definitely the better, faster swimmer. But I’d always compare myself to him and see where my times were when he was my age. We’d go back and forth like that and debate who was faster. We did some different events, but I think it was a classic brotherly rivalry. He definitely inspired me.”
Leo says that he really began to get serious about swimming at New Paltz High School, when local rivalries and the competitive nature of the sport began to ramp up.
“High school swimming was when I really started to want to compete. My sophomore year our big rivalry was against Pine Bush in our high school section. That was our big meet, and I just remember swimming some of my best times at that dual meet and thinking, okay, I’m pretty quick and I think I can contribute, so I should probably take this seriously. From there I really started excelling in the sprint freestyle and just kept going with it.”
New Paltz is a fairly small town, so there was a great deal of crossover between the local swimming club and the high school team. Leo’s times kept improving, he won a New York state title in the 100 free, and he had grown in height to 6’6”. Seeing what Emile was doing at Johns Hopkins, Leo began reaching out to colleges.
Coincidentally, two of the first schools to which he sent recruiting forms were Wesleyan and Bucknell, right at about the same time that former assistant coach Ethan Cooke was joining the Bison staff from Wesleyan. Cooke swam collegiately at SUNY New Paltz and also once coached in Leo's club program. He happened to receive Leo’s questionnaires twice -- once at Wesleyan and then at Bucknell -- so he quickly made the connection and encouraged him to visit Lewisburg.
“My times matched up pretty well, I think I was among the top three sprinters on the team at the time, but a big thing that actually helped me was that I had never lifted weights at all in high school or club. So they saw my fast times and my height, and then the potential to go even faster if I could lift and put on some muscle.”
Like many Bucknell recruits, just visiting campus, meeting the team, and taking a dip in the beautiful Kinney Natatorium is a convincing sales pitch, and it was no different for Leo.
“I really liked the team. I feel like you hear that a lot, but I had a really good recruiting experience. Everyone was extremely welcoming, and I only live like three hours away, so it’s a very reasonable drive to get home or have family visit. The pool is incredible, it’s about triple the size of my old pool, and Dan [Schinnerer] is a very experienced coach who really knows what he’s doing.”
As predicted, the new training resources that became available as a Division I swimmer paid immediate dividends. Leo took advantage of Bucknell’s strength and conditioning regimen and recovery room, as well as access to a dedicated nutritionist and mental performance coaching, and his times quickly began to drop.
“There are so many resources that Bucknell provides that definitely helped me a lot. My times have progressively gotten better throughout my four years, even though we had to change a lot of our training during COVID.”
As a freshman, Leo made his first Patriot League final and finished sixth in the 50 free. He also scored in the 100 free and swam on four relays, including the 400 free relay that broke the school record. His 50 and 100 times were already in the top five in program history, and he seemed to be on track to challenge some long-standing school records and compete for league titles.
But just a few weeks after those 2020 championships, the sports world shut down due to the pandemic. The impact continued into Leo’s sophomore season, when the team competed in a handful of duals, but the Patriot League Championships were not held.
“COVID definitely had an impact. Our practice schedule changed, and it was nowhere near the hours we would normally get in. The weird thing is that I never really got slower, but I wasn’t progressing at the rate that I had hoped.”
When Jim Harvey graduated from Bucknell in 1988, he left with eight individual school records, each of which remained on the board for at least 10 years. Harvey was the East Coast Conference Most Outstanding Swimmer all four years, when he won 11 of a possible 12 league championships in seven different events, plus another eight gold medals on relays. He was a two-time NCAA qualifier and an honorable mention All-American in the 50-meter freestyle as a senior.
Heading into the 2022 Patriot League Championships at Navy, the last of Harvey’s Bucknell records still intact was his 44.37 in the 100 free. A handful of Bison sprinters had come close in recent years, but Leo finally shattered the 34-year-old mark with a 44.14 in the prelims in Annapolis.
Earlier in the meet, Leo also set the school record in the 50 free. Harvey’s 20.17 set at the 1988 NCAA Championships had held up until 2019, when Charlie McFarland nosed under it with a 20.10, but still no Bison swimmer had ever eclipsed the elusive 20-second mark. Leo broke the record with a 20.02 in last year’s conference prelims, and then later that evening he touched in 19.96 to win the silver medal and join the sub-20 ranks.
Over the course of the four-day meet, Leo also helped set school records in four different relays and was part of a Bucknell squad that finished in a solid third place behind Navy and Army. Leo says that while the team goals are most important, breaking the records in the 50 and 100 will be something he always remembers.
“The 100 free record was really cool for me, especially because it was such an old record and was held by the great Jim Harvey, who is a legend in our program. And then going under 20 seconds in the 50 is really big in the swimming world. I don’t want to call it a club, but it feels really good to be under 20. The record book provides a good way to set goals and measure yourself against other really good swimmers. It’s a good test to see how you have improved, because that’s what you’re doing if you’re holding the records.”
Bucknell and Navy have the only two aquatics facilities in the Patriot League capable of hosting the Patriot League Championships, so the two schools alternate hosting duties each year. Because the 2021 meet was canceled, Leo and his teammates are actually preparing to compete for league titles in their home pool for the very first time.
“We are so excited to have Patriot Leagues at Kinney this year. We were supposed to have it sophomore year, so this is a new experience for all of us. I think it’s going to be a really exciting meet.”
Away from the pool, Leo is in his final semester as an environmental geosciences major, which has helped connect him with his love for the outdoors.
“I just love the idea of being outdoors and doing work out in the field. I grew up going to wilderness camps and things like that, so I feel very lucky to be able to study environmental geosciences.”
Last summer, his research with professor Jeffrey Trop took him on a trip to Alaska, where he studied sediment routing pathways and how they interact with the forearc basin in Southern Alaska. They collected samples of minerals called detrital zircons and compared their ages to those from sources already collected. That allows for the construction of sediment pathway models, which then helps geologists understand the evolution of the basin throughout history.
“Professor Trop is a great professor. I’ve loved all of his classes, and I got really interested in doing research when he came and visited one of my other classes and was kind of showing off what he was doing. He was showing us photos of his helicopter and shots out on the rivers and glaciers. I approached him after class and told him this is right down my alley and that I’d love to join in on the research. We sat down and planned it out, and then last summer we were in Alaska for a month doing research. I’m still working on it now.”
Leo sees graduate school in his future, as he has recently sent in a wide swath of applications where he would have a chance to do research and field-based work. He also knows he has a fifth year of eligibility in his back pocket thanks to the loss of a season due to COVID. While he isn’t sure yet if he will swim in grad school, he also hasn’t given up hope of possibly swimming in the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Leo has dual citizenship between the U.S. and Belgium, and his Bucknell times compare well to the top marks of other Belgian swimmers. But in order to make it, he would have to continue to train and then qualify through a number of meets in Europe.
“The only reason I would do a fifth year is because I had at one time, let’s call it a dream, to swim for Belgium in the Olympics. A fifth year would bridge that gap until 2024. It’s a possibility because Belgium historically has not had the world’s strongest swimmers. My times are in the top five, and it’s a young roster. There was a really good sprinter who just retired, so now there’s a whole mix of younger swimmers.”
Summertime in Paris indeed sounds like a dream and Leo would certainly know how to speak the local language, but for now, he is laser-focused on next week’s Patriot League Championships. You can find him in his familiar 50 and 100 freestyle sprints, as well as the 100 butterfly and his usual heavy workload on relays.
Optimism is high, but regardless of the outcome, Leo Kuyl has clearly made the most of his Bucknell experience.
The Patriot League Championships run from Feb. 15-18 at Kinney Natatorium. Preliminaries start at 10 a.m. with finals getting underway at 6 p.m. The entire meet will be streamed live on ESPN+.
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