When it comes to sports, everyone has that one sport they hold onto, no matter how many years passed since we last performed it. For Brennan, it’s pickle ball; my dad, karate; mom, either golf or tennis. Now I wouldn’t consider myself a very sporty person now but in high school, it was swimming.

Unlike alot of my fellow teammates, it didn’t start competitive swimming until I was a sophomore in high school. Even though I didn’t partake in the swim club growing up, I was 100% a water baby. I was one of those kids where you need to bring food out to the water because I didn’t want to get out of the water. You could say that I am a mermaid in that regard. Even as a teen, I wanted to be near water and swim all day long. I was very fortunate enough to live about 10 minutes away from the nearest pool that I can go to every summer growing up.

How I got into swimming was from a question my mom asked me on the way home from school. The question was “how do you feel about joining the swim team?” I was a sophomore in high school, did 2 years of basketball and one season of softball in middle school and I thought I’d give it a shot to join the basketball team until my mom asked me that. My response was along the lines of “sure, I think I have the physique for it.” And so I joined that year.

My first year was probably my favorite year out of the three years because everything is all new to me, especially the culture of swimming. What also helped out was I had a boyfriend during the season, it was more of a seasonal fling that started as two people who share the same lane all season long and eventually develop into something both in and out of the pool. Even though that relationship ended with my first heartbreak, I still smile at that first season because of it. What happened to him? We became friends, especially when he became a she.

Junior year was a blur because it was my worst year mentally and having that one teammate with tongues like daggers didn’t help at all but I persevered and got my only varsity letter. To this day I still don’t know why I deserve it. I’ve stayed in JV only events, and was not the fastest. But I know I beat both times of my main events which were the 50m freestyle and the 100m freestyle.

Senior year was where I pushed hard enough to where I got rewarded. At the beginning of the year, I had a bad knee to where I had to sit out for like a fraction of the season, missing out on a lot of the practices and not be there for one meet, one and only time it happened. But with all that missed practices didn’t slow me down. At the city meet, I got second in my heat for the 100m free. At the intermountain conference, I got first in my heat for that same event. How did I do it? I came up with a game plan and it worked. When I found out that I got first, I was stoked, my parents where jumping up and down in the stands. And right when I got to my seat, my boyfriend at the time, Brandon, called during his lunch break and I literally screamed into the phone and he was so proud of me. So it was a great finish to a three year run.

There has been some fun pranks like when we’d pour ice cold water down our teammates backs from our hydro flasks to literally pushing each other into the pool to wake us up during those morning practices. So many great memories with my time on the team that it’s hard to beat, especially in other team building settings.

As an adult, I don’t swim as often as I wanted to or should’ve due to life. The day I graduated college is when I somewhat retired from swimming. I tried throughout my adult life but it didn’t work out. I used to swim both on and off season for three consecutive years in high school. So maybe my body is tired, I have no clue. If there’s a swim club for adults around the area, I’d take it up, because swimming is something that I loved and still love. All I gotta say is no one is taking this mermaid/shark out of water.