Walter Sopp's philosophy of swimming is simple: "You can never win a meet but it's easy to lose one."

With his position as the anchor swimmer of Penn State's 400-yard freestyle relay, the last event of a meet, he is often faced with being the hero or the heel. But Sopp takes it all in stride.

"I keep everything in perspective by remembering that I can't win a meet by myself, although sometimes I might feel like I can," Sopp, a junior, explained. "It's so easy to make a mistake and lose the meet, but you have to take the good with the bad."

Earlier this season, the Pitt meet was tied at 113 going into Sopp's anchor leg of the last event. He went into the water a half second behind the Panther swimmer and at one point looked to have the lead, but lost by .08 seconds.

"Without question I lost the Pitt meet by swimming a bad race," he said. "I took it out too hard and died like a miserable pig coming home."

Sopp said that sometimes people competing against him mistake his confidence for arrogance.

Penn State's No. 1 short distance freestyler got his beginners swimming card at age 3 and has been competing since age 5. Thousands of races and hundreds of medals later, Sopp will make his second trip to the NCAA Championships. Here he will do what he does best, swim on the Lions' four relay teams which he helped qualify.

"The more important the meet has been and the more significant the competition, Walt has always performed at the level we need him to," Coach Peter Brown said. "Coming through in tight situations is not an easy thing to do. He's starting to swim up to "He's a good man to have on the line," Boyce said. "I can't think of anyone else who handles it better than he does."

"I enjoy swimming anchor and the pressure of being in a key spot," Sopp said. "Sometimes having me in that position may not be what's best for the team."

But don't get the wrong impression, Sopp is, admittedly, no saint. He really wants to be the class clown.

While in kindergarten, Sopp was the hyper little kid racing around in a toy car, crashing into cardboard bricks and other children. He hasn't changed.

During practices, he and teammate Boyce regularly commandeer the rolling kickboard bin and pretend they are in a medieval jousting tournament. They race around the pool pointing a lifeguard's pole at other swimmers and threaten to push them into the water.

"We never really push (the coach) too far and we always seem to know when to stop," Boyce said. "Also, since we do well in most of our meets he probably lets us go a little farther than the others."

Boyce, also Sopp's roommate, said they need more than just swimming practice to expel their energy.

"Once we just get home we're catatonic, we just sit down and watch TV for hours," he said. "Walt and I are always fooling around because if we just swam we'd go crazy."

However, even though Sopp is a jokester rather than a student, at times it is easy to see the scholarly seriousness in his personality. Especially at meets when he knows his anchor leg could determine the outcome for his team.

The tests have been frequent this season. But his master "test-taking" skills have earned him six Penn State records, many second places at the Eastern Seaboard Championships and berths on every NCAA-bound relay team of his collegiate career.

Although born in Reading, Sopp, at age 6, moved with his family to Mission Viejo, Calif., where swimming is twice as popular as football. The Mission Viejo complex contains five pools, every one of which Sopp has been thrown out of several times by several coaches.

"My swimming career wasn't quite as dedicated then," Sopp said. "I usually got kicked out of practice about three times a week for fooling around. My parents never found out. I stayed at the pool because they didn't call home. They just made you leave the workout."

At the weekly meets, Sopp's parents often got nervous. Not because they worried about how their son would finish, but because he was usually nowhere to be found before his event. But somehow he always got there. His parents have a box of ribbons to prove it.

"They never pushed me," Sopp said. "They just wanted to make sure that whatever I did I was doing because I wanted to and not because I felt forced to by anybody."

His coach had the same philosophy.

"He told me if I didn't want to be here I should quit," he said. "I guess that stuck with me because I kept coming back. Ever since then I used that attitude toward any sport I tried. He taught me a lot about dedication."

After the family moved back to Pennsylvania when Sopp was 12, he did quit swimming, but only for a few months at a time to play other sports. In fact, after winning first-string positions in both volleyball and swimming, his coaches wanted him to choose between the two. He refused, excelled in both and went undefeated his senior year at Emmaus High School.

Despite this, Sopp was overlooked for athlete of the year, which brought controversy to the community. He lost to a football player/wrestler who Sopp's parents thought won because of monetary support from the booster club.

"It didn't matter," Sopp explained. "I don't swim for the awards, I swim because I can."

This is what led him to Happy Valley. Despite getting swimming offers from Hawaii and Virginia, Sopp chose Penn State. He wanted to go somewhere where he could contribute to the team and experiment in different events.

Despite his previous successes in the backstroke, Sopp said he didn't have any technique so he considered switching to freestyle his freshman year. Boyce, a backstroke ace, joined the squad the next year, forcing Sopp to work on his freestyle and try harder on his backstroke technique.

That year at Easterns, Sopp swam his worst time in three years in the 100 backstroke but surprised everyone by setting a school record in the 50 freestyle.