By Madeline Folsom on SwimSwam
A native of Missouri, Leo Kurucz broke his back during his freshman year at Mizzou, requiring surgery. After more than a year out of the water, Kurucz raced at the Speedo Sectionals in Mizzou, setting all personal best times, and he is in the transfer portal, looking for a new school for the fall.
Kurucz started at Mizzou in the fall of 2023, and immediately made the Tigers’ travel team, attending meets through the fall semester. At the time, he was primarily a distance freestyler, and at the 2023 Mizzou Invite, he set personal best times in the 1650 free (15:34.81) and 500 free (4:28.65).
At the start of the spring semester in January, Kurucz was doing a power clean in the weight room, and tweaked his back. Thinking it was just a normal injury, he pushed through the pain to his first SEC Championships, where he earned one of Mizzou’s scoring roster spots. At that meet, he finished 30th in the mile (15:47.27), 37th in the 500 free (4:30.96), and 40th in the 200 free (1:38.23).
Kurucz told SwimSwam, “I kind of thought I just tweaked it at first and for a while it was something that we could just pain manage. I remember traveling to SECs in February, and sitting down for a long period of time was hurting my back. I thought, ‘This is not good, I can barely touch my toes right now.’ “
Following the season, Kurucz kept trying different things to help his back pain including taking time out of the water and wearing a back brace, but nothing worked. In July, he got an MRI of his back, which revealed that he had fractured his L2 and L3 vertebrae (the 2nd and 3rd discs in his lumbar spine), and that he had slipped his L4 disc.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, a slipped disc is when “the soft, jelly-like center of a disc in your spine pushes against and leaks out of its outer ring. This can lead to pain, numbness and weakness in your neck, back or legs.”
He said that the doctors believe he slipped his disc during the power clean in January, but since that injury affects the stability in the spine, it led to the fractures as he continued training and racing on it over the next seven months.
“I learned a valuable lesson of quitting when your body is hurting and listening to your body when it’s in pain.”
Following the MRI, he went back in a back brace and sat out of training for a month in August. In October of 2024, Kurucz decided to redshirt the 2024-2025 swim season. In January of 2025, Kurucz received spinal surgery for his fractures and disc. He had two rods placed in his spine, where they stayed for six months.
Around this time, the House settlement began making headlines as roster limits began becoming a major part of the conversation surrounding swimming as Men’s Swimming and Diving rosters were cut to 30 across the NCAA and the SEC took that a step further, cutting to 22 on the men’s side.
Kurucz said, “I heard about the roster cuts, and I thought ‘I’m probably going to get cut in March because I’m not swimming right now’,” which is what ended up happening following the season.
The surgery was successful, but for the six months following the procedure, Kurucz was unable to do much, which he described as the “hardest six months of [his] life”.
The doctors originally told him it would be six to 12 months of recovery before he could get the rods removed, but Kurucz healed quickly and in July of 2025, he got both rods removed from his spine.
On August 20, Kurucz was cleared to swim by his doctors and on September 8th, 2025, he got back in the pool for the first time in almost a year.
He is currently training with Summit Surge Swim Club with Ryan Lee, a club team in his hometown, where he is now working as an age group coach for the team in his free time. He also coached at Lee’s Summit North High School during the Missouri High School season, which wrapped up in November for the boys and February for the girls. The head coach of that program, Thomas Faulkenberry, also coaches Kurucz during the week.
Kurucz currently swims five days a week, lifts two days a week, and does PT twice a week as well. He has also changed his focus in the pool from distance swimming to sprinting, which was a necessary decision for him since when he first got back in the water, he wasn’t even able to swim 1,000 yards in a practice. He has increased his yardage now to 2,500-3,000 a day, but that means he has shifted forward to the sprint events.
At the Speedo Sectionals in Columbia, Kurucz swam three events and set all personal best times. In the 50 free, he finished 4th in 20.56. Before this year, his lifetime best was 21.07 from November of 2021.
He finished 2nd in the 100 free at 44.28, a full second faster than the 45.39 he swam before college.
Kurucz also finished 2nd in the 200 free, touching in 1:37.02 after swimming 1:36.68 in the prelims. This was his 3rd lifetime best of the meet, taking a second off the 1:37.71 he swam in November of 2022.
In the fall, Kurucz will be a redshirt sophomore with three years of eligibility remaining, and he has entered the transfer portal and will be looking for a new school to wrap up his college swimming career.
He spoke briefly about what he is looking for in a program and said that “I want to go to a school, and I want to stay there for three years. I want to go where I am going to be valued and be an immediate impact to the team. I want to not have to worry about this kind of thing again.”
Being part of a team is important to Kurucz, who showed up to Mizzou’s senior day meet four days after his surgery, still using a walker since he couldn’t stand up straight. “It was pretty funny, but I think that just shows how badly I wanted to be part of the team even though I couldn’t be there. I couldn’t go to practice. I couldn’t go lift.”
Kurucz also talked about what this injury taught him, and the lesson he will take into the rest of his life. While he had support at Mizzou from his roommates, who had to take care of him after his surgery, his teammates, and his coaches, he found himself lacking structure and motivation to do much besides going to class.
“As a student-athlete you have structure. You are told where to be and when to be there. I had no structure except going to classes.”
He tried to stay on the same schedule as his team, meeting them for team dinners on campus, telling himself, “‘I have to be around them and talk to them and do things that fulfill me’.
Swimming used to be that thing for me. It was my whole identity.”
After swimming was taken away due to injury, he was forced to learn other ways to spend his time and find other things that brought him joy and occupied his mind. That is one of the things he wants other athletes to learn and focus on: “Find structure. Go do things with your team if you can. Go do something you haven’t done in a while that you used to like.”
Read the full story on SwimSwam: From Back Surgery to Lifetime Bests: Leo Kurucz’s Comeback and Search For New College Home
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