The University of Missouri did not leave a good first impression on Jordy Groters. 

Groters is originally from Aruba. He didn't know the school existed until he traveled to Columbia, MO, for the 2012 Missouri Grand Prix as a member of the Davie Nadadores club swim team from Davie, Florida.

Here's how Groters, now a junior at Missouri, described the trip: "I get here, and it filled every expectation I had," he said. "It snowed; it looked disgusting. I'm like, I hate this place. I'm never coming back."

"That's 16-year-old me talking. And then when I committed I was like, man, I suck," Groters said with a laugh.

Despite the unfavorable first impression, Groters, who placed 13th in the 100 breaststroke at last year's NCAA championships, not only ended up at Missouri but played a large part in getting fellow Aruban Mikel Schreuders, a sophomore who finished 27th in the 200 freestyle at NCAAs, to the school as well. 

It's safe to say Groters and Schreuders are the two fastest college swimmers to ever come from Aruba. The two combine to hold Aruban national records for nine of the 18 long-course individual events contested in world championship meets. Groters' younger brother, Patrick, who is a junior at Pine Crest High School in Fort Lauderdale, FL, holds six of the remaining nine. (Jordy said that he has been heavily recruiting Patrick to join them at Missouri and make Columbia the de facto headquarters of the Aruban national team.) Schreuders was also the lone male swimmer representing Aruba at the 2016 Rio Olympics.


Mikel Schreuders, left, celebrates after swimming a FINA B cut time in the 200 freestyle at the XXXIII Invitational International Delfines del Naco in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in November 2015. The time allowed Schreuders to swim at the Rio Games.

So, how did the pair end up at Missouri? As Groters explains it, through an unlikely series of connections.

Groters and Schreuders first met in 2009, when Schreuders joined the same club team as Groters. However, the two rarely swam together at first, because the team was separated by age groups and Groters is two years older than Schreuders.

"At first I was looking up to (Groters) because he was the only breaststroker in Aruba and I was a breaststroker, and I was like, I want to go under 40 (seconds, in the long course 50 breaststroke) also," Schreuders said.

In 2011, after attending a swim camp held by Davie, Groters and his family moved to South Florida so that Jordy and Patrick could train more seriously and so that Patrick could receive academic help for his dyslexia. Jordy began competing with Davie, but about twice a year he would go to meets in the Caribbean and see Schreuders, who was rapidly improving.

"I would see him at this meet, he's fast. See him at the next meet, he's faster. See him at the next meet, we're just as fast as each other," Groters said. "And I was like, what are you guys doing in Aruba?"

Meanwhile, Groters also realized that was fast enough to swim at an American college. But coming from an island nation of just over 100,000 people with a single Olympic-sized pool in the country, the recruiting process can be daunting. Groters became more visible to college coaches when he moved to the U.S., but he remained largely uneducated about which schools were better than others. Groters and Schreuders said that the main way they judged schools was by seeing swimmers sport their college team's gear at international meets.

"That's kind of how you knew what schools were good," Schreuders said, citing the example of Jamaican breaststroker Alia Atkinson wearing Texas A&M gear at meets in the Caribbean.  

The school that first caught Groters' eye was Louisville. He met Vlad Polyakov, an assistant coach at Louisville, at the Junior World Championships in Dubai in 2013 and fell in love with the idea of swimming for the Cardinals. For months, he scarcely considered other options. But Louisville didn't offer him a scholarship large enough to make school there affordable. 

Discouraged, Groters was talking to coaches at Utah and South Carolina when he got more bad news. Davie's coach unexpectedly left the U.S. in September 2013. Groters wanted to stay with the team, which was renamed Azura, but his parents pushed him towards Pine Crest. 

Upon hearing Groters' situation, one of the coaches at Pine Crest put Groters in touch with a friend of his: Greg Rhodenbaugh, Missouri's head coach. Groters took an official visit to Missouri and found both the campus and the team much more suitable than during his Grand Prix visit. He committed to Missouri a few weeks later.

"It's thanks to that coach that I'm here," Groters said. "I may not have liked the move (to Pine Crest), but I'm very thankful for what the coach did for me."

Schreuders, who graduated high school just a year after Groters because of the way the Aruban education system is set up, was originally planning to go to the Netherlands to attend college, but news of Groters' commitment intrigued him. Like with Atkinson, he saw Groters wearing a Missouri shirt at a meet in Barbados, and Groters talked up the school to Schreuders and his father. Schreuders decided to look into American college swimming as well, and the summer before his senior year, he stayed with Groters' family in Florida so that Groters could help him get in touch with college coaches. The logical starting point was Missouri. 

Schreuders said he was very impressed with Missouri assistant coach Andrew Grevers, who not only pitched Missouri to Schreuders and arranged for him to visit there but helped him get in touch with coaches at other schools as well. Missouri ended up being his only visit.

Unsurprisingly, Schreuders said that having Groters at Missouri was a major draw for him. When he arrived in Columbia, Groters helped him acclimate to college life by showing him around campus and helping him buy a cell phone and set up a bank account. Groters said having Schreuders at Missouri has been beneficial for him, too, saying the opportunity to speak Dutch or Papiamento, the two languages most commonly spoken in Aruba, allows him to relax at times. 

"I feel like, I wouldn't say like I'm in Aruba again, but I feel like I'm talking to my friend how we would talk at school and stuff like that," Schreuders said. "It makes it more comfortable to be here."