Changing sports your junior year of high school is challenging. Especially after doing the sport for nine years. That is what I did. I swam competitively for nine years. I started when I was 8 years old, and swam all the way to junior year in high school. I had so many people try to stop me and tell me that I would be giving up my future. I am literally ninth in the state of Texas. I was talking to countless Division I colleges. But the question is, just how long can you fake it until it becomes clear you won’t make it?
Starting when I was 8, I began swimming in Louisiana at the City of Shreveport Swim Team, now known as South Side Swim Team. I began practicing with them and took a couple lessons on how to fix my mistakes. Once they were fixed, I started moving up groups rapidly. I started in the 10 and under group and moved up all the way to what the club called “group 3”. I was 8 years old, swimming with high schoolers. Off the bat, my parents and I knew that I would be good at this.
I swam through the season and qualified for the Louisiana Age Group State in multiple races. I was rapidly improving. Then, I found out I was moving back to Texas, which is a much more competitive swim state.
After moving, I settled in Mansfield. I joined Mansfield Aquatic Club and was put in “Blue”, the 10 and under elite group. When I turned 11, I was moved up to “Gold” and swam one season there before I was moved up to “junior”. Junior was the BEST group in the whole club for age group swimmers (14&U).
This is where the descent started.
I began swimming with this group and under this new coach. I started taking practice seriously, and I understood that hard work would pay off. I began dropping time rapidly, and that was brought to everyone’s attention. I was in this group for eight seasons, four years of my life.
It wasn’t until I turned 13 that things started to get bad. This swim coach was not good for me. He constantly berated me and put me down for not training up to his standards. As a 13-year-old girl still trying to find herself, that kind of treatment was not good for me mentally. I heavily struggled the next two years in that group. Every day at practice, I cried. I ended up in therapy because I had started to base my worth on how I was performing in my sport.
Let me just say this now, you are so much more than your performances. It took me forever to learn that, but once I did, I found myself.
Once I got into high school, I began swimming under a new coach. One that I believed would be better for me. I was placed in “senior elite” which is the BEST group for senior-level swimming. In MAC, this group was seen as the highest you could go. And so, the training began. Yes, the training was very hard, but it was nothing that I couldn’t handle. I have always been a hard worker. I wanted to show the older swimmers that I had what it takes. I spent years looking up to these older people in the senior elite. But when I got to the group, I began to see cracks in the foundation. I had come to find out they were not who I thought they were.
Fast forward through the season, I went to state my sophomore year and competed in big meets, and performed well. However, things hit the fan. Again, no details need to be provided, but my swim coach took a leave of absence for two months. My old swim coach from “junior” started to coach us again, and at the time, I was dealing with health problems that kept me out of the pool. I was able to overcome them and get back in the pool in just under two months. I swam great that summer and narrowly missed my goals. Ending that summer, I thought I had it all figured out. I always end swim season with a desire to go back and put in more work than I ever have before.
Going into my sophomore year, I was ready to break the norm that had surfaced in my group.
The “Sophomore Slump”. For years, it had always been a thing of “everyone falls for sophomore year”, “you won’t drop time this year, so be ready.”
However, I knew that I didn’t want this to happen to me. I wanted to put in all the work I could to show that this norm could be broken. So, I did it. But not without many challenges that tested me mentally and physically. Starting in the fall, I began to struggle with my eating. I don’t want to say that I had an eating disorder because it was never confirmed by a doctor, but I was starting to lose weight, and it had been multiple weeks in a row that I hadn’t done well at practice. It was raising concerns to my coaches, and it almost ended with me quitting. I had a meeting with my coaches, and I was told that I was severely under-eating. There was no way that I could continue to train with this amount of fuel. So, I went home and ate pizza and ice cream.
The next morning, I had an amazing practice. I started to focus on my nutrition, and that problem was mostly fixed. However, as soon as I recovered and I had gained my weight back, I got sick. I lost 20 pounds because I was so sick that I couldn’t eat. I was able to recover just in time for winter training, and I trained pretty consistently. I went through district and won both of my events, as well as winning one of my events at regionals and qualifying for both of my events at state. I competed at state and didn’t do the best, but I still finaled. I competed at our club of end-of-season meet a few weeks later and I got through it alright and I got a couple new best times. Moving into the long-course season, my last swim season, I would complete, I came with new motivation.
I worked incredibly hard for five weeks on all areas of training. I focused on my nutrition, sleep, and the work I was putting in at practice. Then, things started to go downhill because I got distracted. Everything went off the radar and, to cope, I started something new. Running.
I had gone through the pros and cons. Sure, there were so many pros. Like swimming D1 in college, competing at the national level, and getting to have all of those experiences. But all that mattered was that I wasn’t having fun anymore. It had taken me a very long time to realize I just didn’t love it anymore. After I made that decision with myself, it was time to tell my swim coach. So, I did. I did the mature thing and went to his office to have a face-to-face meeting with him. He always supported me, so I figured if I could show him I was making this decision because that’s what was best for me, he would understand. The first thing he said to me when I told him I was leaving was, “I saw this coming”. OK, so this meeting was going to be different than expected. We continued the meeting, and he continued to say things like, “You didn’t put in the work this past summer” and “some people just aren’t cut out for it”.
He was trying to show me that he didn’t care and that he was content with the situation, which I knew wasn’t true. It can be pretty disheartening when the coach who helped me find my love for swimming and helped me find a new purpose in the sport tells me that I’m just not cut out for it. That hurt.
In the past, when I had thought of leaving swimming behind, I always stopped myself because there was nothing that was waiting for me outside of it. Swimming was my whole life, and I just figured that’s how it would be forever. However, when I started running, I found joy in putting a different kind of work through my body.
Now, when I thought about leaving swim, I had something else to look forward to. Throughout my last swim season, my emotions were very up and down. I would want to quit during training, but then get to a meet and loved it. After a while, I couldn’t handle the stress from something that was supposed to be fun. So, I quit. One of the worst parts about quitting was how much everyone told me that I was making the wrong decision. When the news started to spread, I got tons of texts saying, “But why? You’re so good.” But at the end of the day, I knew what I was choosing to give up when I decided to quit.
However, things change fast. I have started new things, such as running, and I have found a new love for a new challenge. I joined the cross-country team and have found a new home.
