Wolner makes sweet music in and out of the pool

The USD swim team often has music playing over the loudspeakers at practices to lighten the load of all those laps. It’s popular contemporary stuff mostly, with several genres heard from.

Occasionally they’ll listen to the work of Griffin Wolner, a Midwestern singer-songwriter-musician who has published two albums and an EP.

Though not exactly a household name, Wolner’s material has caught on with the Coyotes at the pool. If you heard it you’d understand.

Attempting to categorize someone’s music can be an inarticulate enterprise but it’s safe to say in Wolner’s case that he’d be aligned with familiar artists like James Taylor and John Mayer. The difference would be that he’s singing his own stuff, not theirs.

Why are the swimmers listening? They like it, for one thing. For another, Wolner is a teammate. The tunes they’re cranking up at practice were written and recorded by a member of the Coyote swimming and diving team. That kind of thing doesn’t happen very often.

Wolner can play the piano, guitar, banjo and ukulele. He has a new mandolin he’s going to figure out when he has some time and he was recently accepted at five different schools of optometry. He decided on the Illinois College of Optometry in Chicago.

He swims the butterfly pretty well, too.

“He’s a very smart guy – it’s just not his swimming and his music,” Mahowald said. “Plus he’s a very nice guy. It’s a little annoying at times to think about how talented he is.”

Mahowald is not actually annoyed, of course. It bears mentioning that Wolner, a native of Winona, Minn., works hard at making things look easy. That even applies to the butterfly, a swimming event that resembles something a boot camp sergeant might dream up to punish soldiers who are late for marching drills.

Wolner, whose brother Grant is also a swimmer for the Coyotes, was primarily a freestyler in Winona – with three state titles his senior year – who slowly gravitated toward the butterfly as his top event as his career advanced at USD. With the extra COVID year of eligibility he had another year to work on it after finishing sixth at the Summit League last season.

Taking advantage of that extra year of eligibility is common in some sports but an outlier in swimming. Wolner is sort of an outlier himself, though, so it makes some sense. 

“I think some people get to year three or year four and they’re pretty burned out, they’re ready to call it quits,” Wolner said. “But I’ve been at it so long and it’s been such an integral part of my life that I just wasn’t ready to give it up. When COVID gave us the opportunity to do an extra year, I talked to the coaches and said I’d love to do another year. They said they’d love to have me back. Honestly, I was very lucky to have the opportunity to return for another season.” 

Next fall Wolner, a medical biology and psychology double-major, will be on his way to becoming an optometrist. He’s never going to leave the music behind, however. He can see his future very clearly on that point. That goes for playing it and writing it.

“It’s very therapeutic,” he said. “A lot of the lyrics come pretty quickly – I can lay them down right on my phone. It’s very rewarding. I never thought I’d be able to see my name on a Spotify album or on Apple Music. When I was able to put those albums out into the world, it was something I was shocked about. It seemed really out there.”

In Vermillion, Wolner will occasionally play at the Varsity Pub and has also played at various locales in his hometown and a few other places in southern Minnesota. His junior year he made an attempt to appear on “The Voice” that ended in a late cut after advancing through four rounds of online tryouts.

“It was a cool opportunity to go through that process and see what it was like,” he said. “I talked to an executive and sent them a bunch of my songs for them to listen to. It was exciting at the time to go through that.”

He has collaborated with Charlie Babcock, a distance runner at USD who also plays the guitar, while recording these albums on campus in dorm rooms, not Nashville or Los Angeles. You’d never know that, though, unless someone told you. 

“We were able to bounce things off each other – it was great to have another perspective and to be able to put things together,” Wolner said. “It was rewarding to be part of that process and be able to put the music out there.”

It’s one thing to be gifted musically. It’s another to be generous with that gift. It’s why Wolner will bring his guitar to team gatherings and shows up at the Varsity to play. 

“Music and swimming have shaped the way I am,” he said. “I’ve done both for so long they’ve really given me opportunities to meet and work with some amazing people and go to amazing places. I'm just incredibly thankful for what both have done for me.”

Mahowald’s mother-in-law was working at the Minnesota state high school swim meet every year when Wolner was showing up every year as a member of the Winona team. Even then, on a once-a-year visit, the then-teenager made an impression.