After breaking my collar bone during a track meet my freshman year, I swam the entire sophomore season with this weak shoulder. Let me tell you, it’s really tough swimming butterfly and backstroke with a broken clavicle. Because I couldn’t perform as well as I would have liked I wasn’t in many articles in the local paper, if any. Our coach was also a real big jerk. He only talked to the paper if we won (which I believe was a total of three times that season) and he never put me in the events that I should have been in. Thank goodness for the meet against Southgate (our second to last dual meet), where we knew we were going to get wasted anyway so we were allowed to choose what individual events we would get to be in. After doing nothing but the 100 butterfly and backstroke for two seasons I requested to be in the 500 freestyle. I did way better than Coach Sweet (a former Marine) had expected, beating both our regular distance swimmers by at least 40 seconds. After swimming the 500 free at two dual meets and dropping my time by about 5 seconds Coach Sweet decided to put me in the 200 free at the Mega Blue meet, the most important meet of the year, without having ever competed in it before. I qualified 11^th in the 200 and 7^th in the 500 and ended up finishing 12^th (due to hyperventilating) and 8^th, respectively. I earned third place medals in two relays at the Mega Relays at the beginning of the year and I earned a second place team medal in a little competition Coach Sweet called “The Big 5”. The 5 was the 5 events that you had to swim as fast as you could without stopping. (Well, you could stop, but then you wouldn’t win.) The events were a mile (72 lengths = 1800 yards, so it was actually quite a bit longer than a mile), 500 yards, 200 yards, 100 yards, and finally 50 yards. I came in second only to Amanda Hickman, a swimmer who had brought home 5 medals from last year’s league meet. Again, records were broken but I was screwed out of those also. I’ve learned that male coaches of female swimmers tend to favor the skinnier and prettier team members because their theory is that is you’re skinnier you must be more fit and faster. Boy, were Dale and Sweet wrong.

After a rocky freshmen year of doing nothing but sprints and sprint relays, I started long jumping during my sophomore year of track. I tried high jump at a practice and decided that it definitely wasn’t for me. Toward the end of the season I started expressing an interest in hurdling to Coach Phillips. Unfortunately, I did not hurdle in any meets during my sophomore year. I earned three medals, all coming from a freshmen/sophomore relay meet. The three medals were a 2^nd place in the long jump relay, 4^th place in the 400 meter relay, and a 5^th place in the shot put relay, the first time I had ever thrown shot put in a meet. In case you are confused how long jump and shot put can be considered a relay you have 2 (the minimum) or 3 people jump, throw, or vault (depending on the event). The two people with the longest/highest distance have their best result added together and there’s the relay.

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