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Swartz finds peace with his troubled past

With the start of the NCAA Tournament, March is the best time of the sporting year for many. Around here, the 10th anniversary of Wisconsin’s Final Four appearance makes it especially memorable.

But for the longest time, March of 2000 was neither happy nor memorable for Julian Swartz.

“Looking back at it now, I don’t even know why it was good for me to try to play at all from a college standpoint,” he said this week.

One of the best high school prospects this state has produced in the last 20 years, Swartz averaged 23.2 points a game as a 6-foot-6 senior swingman at Waukesha South. He carried a 4.15 grade-point average as class president.

A lot of schools wanted him. Swartz chose Wisconsin, where, along with his top-shelf athletic and academic skills, he brought a debilitating mental illness.

In the third grade, he began seeing a school counselor for what would later be diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Along with the repetitive behavior and thoughts he could not get out of his head, Swartz became a self-torturing perfectionist. Even the reality that he was an A-plus student didn’t matter.

“I stayed up all night studying because it took me forever with the obsessions and compulsions,” he said.

The destructive pattern intensified at Wisconsin, where Swartz came off the bench for a team that wasn’t supposed to make the top half of the Big Ten, much less the Final Four. But he couldn’t enjoy it because no matter what he did, Swartz believed it wasn’t good enough to please himself and especially others.

Severe depression and an act of desperation led him to UW-Green Bay, which he soon left without playing basketball. He then found himself back home in Waukesha, where he joined the Division III Carroll College team after winter break and finished the season.

With two years of eligibility left, he never played basketball again.

“That was one of the happiest times in my life,” Swartz said. “I hadn’t played in 2½ years. I was glad when I made that comeback at Carroll. It was a good ending to a story, I think.”

Better yet, a good story continues.

Now 29, Swartz took the psychology degree he earned from Carroll and a master’s from Marquette to recently start a career in school counseling. He’s in the West Allis district, where he coaches eighth-grade basketball and moonlights as his brother’s assistant at Waukesha South.

“I’ve always wanted to make a difference in other people’s lives in sharing the story,” Swartz said. “That’s what it’s always been about. I was able to play and I was able to help some people along the way.”

Swartz helped himself by finding a compatible therapist. Tom Crean helped by hiring Swartz as Marquette’s graduate assistant for three years and then for a brief time at Indiana. The experience made Swartz realize that basketball was his passion, not the enemy that caused him to leave what, from the outside, had every appearance of an idyllic situation at Wisconsin.

“I think a lot of people think it was the pressure, the Big Ten, the amount of fans, the arenas and all of that,” he said. “It had nothing to do with that.

“That’s another misconception. It’s not basketball that’s the problem. If I were talented in anything else, it would happen in that.

“It’s just that basketball was what I was good at,’’ he said. “It’s not the game that fazes you. It’s the disease and the perfectionism and so forth.”

With counseling, coaching and a supportive family as a foundation, Swartz is now able take a pain-free outlook on his freshman season at UW.

“I wish I could go back to Wisconsin,” he said. “When I’m able to go back now, I’m able to say to myself, ‘Wow, you were only a freshman on an upper-class team that went to a Final Four.’ I played some. I’m able to keep it in perspective. Back then, I got caught up feeling like a failure because I wasn’t getting to play too much.”

Last month, Swartz gathered his courage and attended the team’s 10th reunion in Madison. Everyone, he found, was supportive.

“Going to that Final Four reunion was a huge, huge accomplishment for me from a health standpoint,” he said. “I was very close to coach (Dick) Bennett. I look back on it with fond memories, but it was really the beginning of a very difficult period of time for me.

“There’s a lot of symbolism involved. When you go to the Kohl Center those feelings of failure come back, so for me to be able to go to that reunion and reconnect with those coaches and players, I felt great.

“My mind didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t have any bad thoughts of failure. I just enjoyed the moment.”

He now enjoys March as passionately as any college basketball fan might.

Better yet, Crean recently asked Swartz about his health.

“I flat-out told him it’s the best I’ve been in an extremely long time,” he said.