Blue Springs South’s Carter McIntosh is The Star’s Male Scholar-Athlete of the Year
READ MORE
2023 KC Star Scholar Athletes
Expand All
Presenting the 2023 KC Star Scholar-Athletes, and how we determined this year’s winners
Big stage, bright stars: Meet the 100-plus school-by-school Scholar-Athletes for 2023
KC Star Female Scholar-Athlete of the Year Taylor Cruse ‘lifts everyone up around her’
Blue Springs South’s Carter McIntosh is The Star’s Male Scholar-Athlete of the Year
.jpg)
As The Star honors its 2023 Scholar-Athletes, let’s check in with our winners from 2013
There is an old picture that the McIntosh family has saved for more than a decade, depicting 5-year-old Carter with a medal around his neck. He’s standing next to a neighborhood swimming coach, Errich Oberlander, and to be honest, the medal signaled only that Carter had participated in class. Every kid got one.
There is a newer photo that the McIntosh family saved recently, depicting Carter as a junior at Blue Springs South High School, with a medal around his neck. He’s standing next to his swimming coach, Errich Oberlander, and to be honest, this medal meant something. Just one kid earned one.
On Thursday morning this week, Oberlander is talking about both of those photos. But the real story, he points out, is the time that lapsed between them — the recognition for a first swim team and the recognition for a Missouri high school 50-yard freestyle state champion.
“A lot of flashback moments for sure,” Oberlander said.
Carter McIntosh is The Star’s Male Scholar-Athlete of the Year, and like most of his predecessors in this honor, he’s headed to college to prolong his time as an athlete; he will swim at Miami (Ohio).
When we do these annual stories, that’s often part of the journey — the teenager who exceled at high school sports also did it as a grade-school kid. Who would’ve thought, right?
But McIntosh did not follow the conventional path. See, he had basically decided to quit swimming his junior season, and by the time he made an about-face and determined he wanted to swim in college, it was so late in the recruiting game that he had to email college coaches and beg for a spot.
Really.
To this day, just a couple of months shy of walking onto Miami’s campus to embark on a college swimming career, McIntosh will tell you he’s a tennis player. And he’s a darn good one, too, once ranked in the top-5 in the state for his age. While participating in The Star’s photo shoot for this piece, he lugged a swimming backup on his shoulders but carried a tennis racket in his hand. The latter was his first love, his first college plan and so clearly his first priority that he was prepared to give up all else for it.
He’d even told his parents he planned to quit his swim team midway through his junior season, but he was met with some pushback.
“It just was time to pick between tennis and swimming, and I was all about playing college tennis,” he said. “But fortunately my parents told me to stick it out.”
A schedule incorporating both sports had been a grind. On a typical day, the alarm buzzed at 4:30 a.m., and by 5:30, he was in the pool. A full day of school followed — which one year included all weighted classes — and another swim practice came afterward. Then he’d shower, change, hop in his car and drive to Overland Park for a two-hour private tennis lesson.
Oh, and then homework. McIntosh finished in the top-10 of an academic class that included nearly 500 students. His parents had encouraged him to challenge himself, which meant taking every advance class that he could cram into his schedule — even if it meant settling for a couple of B-grades. He will enter Miami with enough credits to be a sophomore.
He finished high school with just two Bs, and he says, “I wish those didn’t happen,” as though it still gnaws at him.
Compile that together, all in a day’s work, and you can gather at least a sense for why he wanted to give something up, and we haven’t even mentioned that he also finished third in the state in eSports.
Anyway, that something to relinquish, at least for one dinner-table conversation, would be swimming.
For a really brief time. Just one week later, at that same table, he looked up at his parents, Shannon and Jamie, with a bit of a different outlook.
“He comes back to us, and he says, ‘You know, I’m not far from the school record; I think I’ll break the school record,’” his mom, Shannon, said. “It seemed impossible because he had to cut a lot of time, but he’s a very goal-oriented kid.”
With some assistance from a revised training program Oberlander devised, the record belonged to McIntosh with a few weeks.
And then again.
The first came at the conference meet, where he lined up alongside year-round swimmers, beat them all and said, “Well, I can break it even more.”
And then he did. McIntosh won the state title in the 50 free, Blue Springs South’s first male individual title since Oberlander took over the program 14 years ago.
“It was the most surreal experience,” his dad, Jamie, said. “What just happened? It was only a month ago that he was going to quit.”
By the way, it’s not like tennis got lost in this shuffle. He still placed third in the Missouri Class 3 state singles tournament as a junior, and then fourth in the state doubles tournament as a senior, pairing with younger brother Judson.
These are two sports that, typically, the best of the best play year-round. McIntosh has been a swimmer for two months of the year since Oberlander had to literally throw him in a cold pool just to get him to participate. Just to earn that first medal.
How did a part-time swimmer shatter the party at the state meet for his most prized medal?
There’s a personality trait about McIntosh that threads through both sports, even threads through his classroom work — attention to detail.
Oberlander offered the clearest example of it, in what would become almost like a game during training. At practice every day, he would hold a stopwatch, and after McIntosh completed a sprint swim, he would pop his head out of the water and guess his time. (It’s in the range of 21-22 seconds.)
“And he would tell me within literally one or two tenths of a second what his time was,” Oberlander said. “It was just uncanny.
“He’s just always been very in tune with his body.”
.png "unnamed (1).png")
His times got too fast to ignore, and that’s a reference to himself, because it’s as though he was the last one to realize that, hey, maybe there’s a future here. It wasn’t until December of his senior season that he decided, you know what, maybe this whole swimming thing is the better route.
His solution? Make it happen himself. That’s kind of his thing. He researched a list of all the Division I programs in the country, logged on to their team website and found the head coach’s email. He opened the note with his academic resume, followed with his swimming times and closed with this:
“I’d love to be on your team,” he wrote. “Just give me a shot.”
For years, he had traveled literally coast to coast to help his tennis recruitment. He’d dreamed of being a Division I athlete.
He just didn’t expect it to come in swimming.
Or, you know, via email.
This story was originally published June 18, 2023 at 5:00 AM.