Just after 5:30 on a Saturday morning, the light from towering halogen lamps glints off the Olympic-sized pool as young swimmers drag into practice.

"Come on down here, gang," says St. Petersburg Aquatics coach Fred Lewis, as the group pokes along.

More than a dozen young swimmers prepare to jump into the pool, adjusting swim caps, goggles and suits, as Lewis calls out the first instructions of the day.

Four swimmers - taller and older than the rest - stand out. They are focused, ready. As the younger swimmers giggle and chatter, the four stride confidently to their practice lane and plunge in.

This is the St. Pete Aquatics team, an elite squad of swimmers who each are considered among the best in the nation. At this early morning practice June 10, 2006, at North Shore Pool, a public facility in St. Petersburg, Fla., they glide through the water with efficiency and speed.

Megan Romano, Daniela Brands, Mitchell Snyder and Brenno Varanada range in age from 15 to 20. Their birthplaces are as diverse as Germany and Brazil. And their ultimate swimming goals run from earning a college scholarship to joining the U.S. Olympic team.

Two things draw them to the pool each day at this hour: their own will to succeed and the prodding of Lewis.

Lewis, by his own admission, can be tough on the four. But he says it's because he sees in them such promise. His role, he says, is to take a talented group of swimmers and bring out their very best performances.

"They are all very hard workers," Lewis says of the four. "But they can all learn to work to the next level."

Megan Romano

At 15, Romano is the youngest member of the team. But she is by far the one who has achieved the most fame nationally.

Romano, now 6 feet tall, began swimming at age 6. She started winning races immediately and set her first record by 11. In March of 2005, at age 14, she became the first swimmer in Junior Olympics history to set a record in each race she swam, the St. Petersburg Times reported.

In July, Romano plans to try out for the team that will train in Canada for the 2007 Olympic trials.

Fans have created a Web site, meganromano.com, which charts the Northeast High School student's upcoming meets and catalogs her growing list of wins. Romano blushes, smiles and shrugs at the attention.

She maintains an A average in school, despite swimming six days a week, usually from 7 to 9 a.m., and again from 4 to 6 p.m. on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It's a schedule that leaves little time for being a teenager.

She says she sometimes has to sacrifice time with friends to swim. But she says she expects it to pay off in the future. What she hopes for, she says, is "a scholarship, and money, and things like that."

Daniela Brands

Brands, 18, is the only one among the group who took up swimming on a whim.

She started at age 12 - much later than Romano and others - and not because her parents prodded her, but because a friend was doing it and it seemed fun.

Brands was a student in Germany, where she was born. Within two years, her family had relocated to St. Petersburg, and her competitive swimming career began to blossom.

While attending St. Petersburg Catholic High School, Brands joined the St. Pete Aquatics team. She proceeded to qualify for the Florida State Championship four years in a row, and set records at both the city and district championship levels. Now, she competes at Auburn University in Auburn, Ala., where she is a rising sophomore majoring in international business, German and broadcast journalism.

As an only child, she jokes about being spoiled. But it's clear from talking to her that she remains a dedicated athlete.

"I love the sport," she says. "I always loved it. But when you are on a team you are united. You get along, back each other up. You race each other, but you are still friends."

Brands says she works hard to keep her grades up while maintaining a demanding practice schedule.

"You've got to have your priorities straight," she says.

Mitchell Snyder

Snyder, 19, had a strong role model to follow from the minute he began his swimming career at age 8. His older brother, Brad, a recent graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who also swam for St. Pete Aquatics, led the Navy swim team to its largest margin of victory over the Army as team captain.

The brothers joined St. Pete Aquatics with the rest of the family when Mitchell Snyder was 12. Since then, he has scored his own victories.

Snyder now swims for Drury University in Missouri. He came in second in the men's 1650-meter freestyle at the 2005 NCAA Division II nationals and is a three-time district champion for the Drury team.

"I basically eat, sleep, and swim every day," he says laughing.

The chemistry major says he wants to be a pharmacist. He plans to get a degree at Drury, then go to St. Petersburg College for pharmacy school.

Brenno Varanada

Brazilian-born Varanada, 20, is the oldest on the team. Without swimming, he might never have come to the United States.

In Brazil, Varanada set state records at age 12 and was the tenth top swimmer in the country by 14.

"In Brazil, swimming gets really intense," Varanada says. "When I was little, at 10 or 11 in Brazil, I used to drive two hours to practice and used to puke because I couldn't take the anxiety."

But Varanada says the training was so demanding that as he entered high school, he had to make a choice: quit school to swim full time, or give up the sport to continue his studies.

His parents chose to move to St. Petersburg so he wouldn't have to choose.

"The first few months were hard to go through without English as my background," he says.

It was Varanada's mother who first heard about St. Pete Aquatics. She had heard about one of Lewis' swimmers when the family was living in Brazil, so she and Varanada decided to visit him at the club.

"The first time I went to the pool, you know to look, Fred said, 'Well, are you going to get in the water or what?'" Varanada remembers. "He said, 'This could be our future national swimmer,' joking around, and put me in the lane for faster swimmers."

Interacting with teammates at St. Pete immediately forced Varanada to practice the language.

He went on to swim at Binghamton University, State University of New York, where he continues to stand out. He set a record recently in the 400-meter individual medley, a swimming event using all four competitive strokes - butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle - on consecutive lengths of a race. His speed was 3:59:35.

Varanada, the team's most versatile swimmer - he performs well in most events - is with St. Pete once again this year while home from college. In the fall he will return to classes as a mechanical engineering major. He plans to get a masters degree while working for a company.

Fred Lewis

Bringing the team together is Lewis, 55, a coach who pushes his swimmers to the limit.

"Tons of kids have talent," he says. "But do they have the discipline?"

Passion for the sport has propelled Lewis and the swimmers he coaches to succeed. Lewis coached three-time Olympic gold medalist Nicole Haislett Bacher and well over 50 college-level competitors in the past 37 years.

His swimmers say they swim with Lewis because of his reputation as the man to see if you're serious about the sport. His trademark is the tight grip that he keeps on what happens at practices.

"At times, it's quite trying - trying to work with these kids - and sometimes it's a matter of dragging the potential out of them," Lewis says.

His success in doing so has earned him recognition from other coaches.

Lewis holds the highest level of certification from the American Swimming Coaches Association, signifying that he is in the top two to five percent of coaches in the United States. The organization also lists him in its annual Awards of Excellence for 2006.

Lewis says swimmers like Romano, Brands, Snyder and Varanada are successful not only because they are talented, but because they know how to take good advice.

"If you are a coach, the people who respond to your coaching, no matter what anybody says, normally get a lot more attention than people who don't respond to your coaching," he says. "... These four do what I ask and they do it to the best of their ability."

He adds: "We're the people who write the music. But they've gotta play it."

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