University of Georgia Athletics
Locus Makes Excellence Look Easy
May 01, 2015 | Swimming & Diving
By John Frierson
UGAAA Staff Writer
ATHENS, Ga. -- Maddie Locus doesn't have your typical summer plans.
An All-American swimmer at Georgia and the 2014-15 Southeastern Conference H. Boyd McWhorter Female Scholar-Athlete of the Year, Locus will split her time between doing "math research" during her internship at Emory University and training for the World University Games, which will take place this July in South Korea.
The freestyle and butterfly sprinter from Sugarland, Texas, fast in the water and a summa cum laude graduate, is anything but typical.
Georgia coach Jack Bauerle has had plenty of outstanding swimmers and students over the years. Locus -- for her work ethic in and out of the pool, for her mind and personality, for her determination, for just about everything she does -- is among his all-time favorites.
Here are some actual words and phrases Bauerle used in a recent interview to describe Locus: demure; like a steel trap ready to spring; ridiculous; absolutely great; and like a cheetah.
Everything he said, he said with a smile, as though each sentence brought back a fond memory.
"I think she has a great sense of humor, she's a great kid and I'm just proud of what she's done here," Bauerle said. "This SEC Scholar-Athlete award, that's a spectacular win."
She's easy to like and easy to admire. And with the double major in mathematics and Italian, combined with her accomplishments in the pool, Locus makes achieving excellence across the board look pretty easy.
Yes, along with being a math whiz and a standout in one of the most demanding of all collegiate sports, Locus studied Italian. And she earned the Outstanding Graduating Senior Italian Major/Minor Award.
"I didn't just want to be doing math, so I thought, what would be fun to learn? And I've always wanted to learn Italian, and one of the reasons is because my mom is 100-percent Italian, but she doesn't know Italian," Locus said. "The language is beautiful and the country is beautiful. I did a study-abroad two summers ago in Siena, which is in Tuscany. I loved it."
Locus' own last name is a math term for "a set of points which share a common property or satisfy a certain condition." She said she's so drawn to math because it's logical. And once she got to high school and calculus, and then to higher and higher levels of math, "It was like explaining the logic behind the math I'd been learning."
For the purposes of this story, Locus was asked to explain it to her interviewer -- a college graduate and professional writer for more than 15 years, mind you -- like she was talking to a fifth-grader. It didn't work.
She was then asked to explain it like she would on Twitter, which limits posts to 140 characters. Nope.
There was talk of pure and applied math, identifying properties and then the room started to spin, or so it seemed. Locus does the kind of super-smart, proof-based math that Matt Damon's character is shown doing at MIT in the film "Good Will Hunting."
Here's her simplest explanation of the research she did at Emory last summer and that she'll resume this summer, before beginning her post-graduate work: "I do pure math. In applied math, you can do experiments and measure changes over time in different things. Pure math, it's more like looking at some theoretical concept and trying to understand it better. And so what I did was, I took these certain identities that I learned about at the internship and then my research partner and I generalized them and figured out different properties of them that weren't known before."
Yes, last summer she and her research partner came up with, to put it very simply, some new math. It's way more impressive than it sounds. Impressing Emory math professors isn't easily done; she did. Locus spoke about her research and discoveries to the UGA Number Theory Seminar.
And in the midst of all that math, Locus was still training in the pool. Because she was in Atlanta, away from Gabrielsen Natatorium, Locus trained under the direction of Doug Gjertsen, an outstanding coach that won a gold medal in the 4x200-meter freestyle relay during the 1988 Olympics.
Injured and ill at times throughout her career, a healthy Locus has improved dramatically in the past 12 months. Gjertsen's workouts were different from Georgia's and Locus said she benefitted from the new routine.
"I tend to get hurt a lot and I get sick a lot, and last year everything just kind of came together," she said. "I went the whole year without any serious injuries and I think it helped a lot, just being consistent in my training."
Oddly, Locus said she doesn't think about math much while in the pool doing the endless training laps that swimmers do every day.
Ten Georgia athletes have earned the McWhorter award since it was first handed out in 1986 -- the latest winners were announced Thursday -- and Locus is the eighth member of the swimming and diving program to get it. She's also the third Georgia women's swimmer to win it in the past four years, joining Wendy Trott (2012) and Shannon Vreeland (2014).
In the SEC's announcement Thursday, commissioner Mike Slive said this of Locus and men's award winner Nathanael Franks, a track and field athlete at Arkansas: "They represent the very best that college athletics has to offer."
Bauerle couldn't have said it better.
John Frierson is a staff writer for the UGA Athletic Association and curator of the ITA Men's Hall of Fame at the Dan Magill Tennis Complex. You can follow him on Twitter: @TheFrierson and @ITAHallofFame.
