University of Pittsburgh Athletics
The Long Way Home: Jan Ujevich Bellhy's Return to Pitt
7/27/2026 1:00:00 PM | General, Women's Swimming
Jan Ujevich Bellhy can't tell you much about her races. Ask her about a specific 100 freestyle or a medley relay from four decades ago, and the details blur together. Ask her about the girls, the coaches or the practices, though, and everything comes rushing back at once.
It's a fitting way to talk about a Hall of Fame career, because Ujevich Bellhy's path to Pitt was never a straight line. It looped through Beaver County, California and Florida before finally settling back in Oakland. Every stop along the way shaped the swimmer who would become one of the most decorated in program history.
"I remember the fun more than my races," she said. "I remember the girls, I remember the coaches, I remember training and the practices, some of the crazy practices."
Long before she was a Panther, Ujevich Bellhy was a rising star out of Beaver County, training with the Pitt Aquatic Club and climbing national rankings as a teenager. By the time she graduated high school in 1979, recruiting letters were pouring in from programs across the country. One stood above the rest.
For a swimmer who was already looking past conference meets toward the biggest stage available, the decision felt obvious.
"University of Florida was the number one school in the country. They just won the AIAWs," Ujevich Bellhy said. "It was too good to pass up at that point in time."
She swam for the Gators through the 1980 Olympic Trials, a boycotted Games that never gave her the chance to prove what she could do on the biggest stage. When the results at trials didn't match what she believed she was capable of, she started thinking about home instead of another season in Florida.
That pull toward home was not just about swimming faster.
"I wanted to go back home to my old coach," Ujevich Bellhy said. "So we packed myself up from Florida and came back, my sophomore year, to Pitt. It was a pool that I had known, a town that I love, and a coach that I loved."
For Ujevich Bellhy, Pitt was never really a choice to begin with. It was closer to inheritance. Her mother went there. So did three uncles who played basketball for the Panthers, along with her brother and cousins. Her husband would go on to attend Pitt as well and her daughter later went through the nursing program.
Given all of that, it is not hard to understand why the return didn't feel like transferring. She did not have to learn a new campus or adjust to an unfamiliar city. She simply had to pick up where she left off.
"Coming back home was really truly a homecoming for me," Ujevich Bellhy said. "I knew the city, I knew the school, I knew the campus. It was just like walking back into something that you didn't really have to adjust to."
She finished her career the way she started it, which is to say fast. Ujevich Bellhy earned 11 of her 18 career All-America citations at Pitt, was named Most Outstanding Female Swimmer at the 1983 Big East Championships in the league's first year of existence and won three individual Big East titles along with two relay titles. Her name is inscribed on the Varsity Walk as a Blue-Gold Award recipient.
Even with all of that hardware, the conference meet was never really the point for her. She viewed the Big East as a checkpoint on the way to a much bigger target, one that mattered more to her than any individual result.
"My sights were always on nationals," Ujevich Bellhy said. "The Big East was sort of a stepping stone for us to get to nationals. As long as I'm doing well, I'm going to be scoring points for the team, but my sights — I think all my years — were beyond the Big East. I always knew the competition was going to be better and faster, even somewhere else."
Some of her clearest memories from those years have nothing to do with swimming at all. There were training sessions where the team pushed cars around the Field House parking lot under new head coach Bill Belowich and ten day trips to Puerto Rico over Christmas break that doubled as some of the best team bonding of her career.
One memory in particular has stuck with her far longer than any race. As a sophomore or junior, she was asked to join a foreign training trip to South Africa and turned it down because of her opposition to apartheid, a decision that led to a conversation with Belowich she still thinks about today.
"That really stands out in my mind," Ujevich Bellhy said, "because you have a lot of conversations with your coaches outside of how fast you are swimming and that just really stuck out in my mind. He treated us like adults, making adult decisions."
Ujevich Bellhy already had her name on the Varsity Walk long before this honor arrived. This felt different, and heavier, in a way that caught her off guard when the call finally came.
"I feel so honored with the Hall of Fame," she said. "This almost gets me teared up. To be in the Hall of Fame at Pitt is no joke. This is serious stuff. To be among those who are honored, I feel like I'm in a super elite club."
More than four decades after she first pushed off the wall at Trees Hall pool, Ujevich Bellhy says the pull of Pittsburgh has never really faded. Old teammates reunited in Puerto Rico again this past winter and she still spends weekends on the water with former training partners and their spouses, a reminder that the connections built back then never really went away.
"Pittsburgh is a unique town in that you become welcome, you become family," she said. "You have the whole university, all the alumni and everybody in the Pittsburgh area that seems to be pulling for you."
For a swimmer who once left Pittsburgh chasing the best program in the country, that kind of connection is really the whole story. She left and Pitt was always going to be where she came back to.
This story is part two of an eight-part series profiling Pitt Athletics' 2026 Hall of Fame class. Check back on pittsburghpanthers.com throughout the coming weeks as we spotlight each inductee ahead of their induction.
