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QuickTake:
My daughter, Leah Butler, has been a middle-of-the-pack swimmer for years. But with the support of her teammates and her college coaches, she’s kept plugging away and gotten a little better every year. That’s worth a celebration.
It took a lot of nudging, but I finally secured my daughter’s permission to attend her college swim team’s Senior Day Saturday, Jan. 31.
Seniors are honored at the last home meet with a brief recitation of their accomplishments and some polite applause on the pool deck. They pose for a photo with their parents or siblings or — if family is not available — their friends and roommates. Then they get on with the meet.
I had been saying I wanted to go to this for months — since September, when the Wellesley College swimming and diving schedule came out.
Every time I brought it up, I got the same response: “Why would you want to travel 3,000 miles to watch me swim slowly?” Leah would say. (Wellesley is 13 miles outside of Boston.)
“It’s not about how fast you swim,” I kept telling her. “It’s about celebrating your commitment to your sport for so long.”
“Well,” she said, in what I’m sure she figured would be the final word. “No other parents are going to be there.”
I laughed out loud at that one. That was like saying there aren’t going to be any other parents at graduation. The stubbornness was breathtaking.
That stubbornness probably has something to do with what makes a good swimmer. To the outsider, nothing seems as miserable as swimming. Athletes get up before dawn to dive into chilly water and stare at the black line on the bottom of the pool for two hours, covering 5,000 to 6,000 yards in a session.
Then they go back in the afternoon and do it again.
I kept pestering her. And at Christmas, I got a typed letter. It read, “You can come to Senior Day if you want. Merry Christmas! Love, Leah.” And in her handwriting, with a ^ after the word “want,” she added, “but you don’t have to!”
Yes! I’m going to Senior Day.
I wasn’t kidding when I told her: It’s really not about the times — it’s about her toughness.
Leah specializes in the 500 freestyle. Also, her coach can count on her to swim the mile to pick up a few points for her team, or stick her on a relay at the end of a meet when everyone else is tired.
But she’s far from the best in the pool. Not even close. She’s just always loved it.
When she was a baby, not even walking, her dad would bring her to family swim at a local pool on Sunday afternoons. The two of them would bounce around, and occasionally go underwater, and she’d giggle when they came back above the surface.
She took lessons, and those led to preswim team, which turned into summer swim team. That turned into club swimming, first in Pennsylvania, then with T.E.A.M. Eugene when we moved out this way.
I think she liked the feeling of being in the water and of having done something hard in the morning before the day really got cracking. When she was a sophomore at South Eugene High School, she swam mornings at the Sheldon pool. Twice a week, her alarm would go off at 4:55 a.m. and one of us would drive her over to be there by 5:20. She’d follow those up with daily after-school practices.
But her race times rarely seemed to match the effort she was putting in, and that could be frustrating. My husband joked when Leah had another meet that was just OK, by her lofty standards, anyway: “Hey! She gets her money’s worth.”
When the pandemic hit, and pools closed, she felt the loss. Always an athlete, she turned to running and golf until she could swim again.
Leah swam 5:55 in the 500 free at her district meet as a high school senior. It was 2022, and the kids got out of the pool and immediately put their masks back on. She was fourth, because so many kids had stopped swimming during the COVID-19 years.
She thought that last high school meet was the end of her swimming, too.
But at Wellesley, a women’s college that competes in NCAA Division III, she met some of the seniors on the team during her first weeks on campus. They welcomed her as a walk-on, even though she hadn’t been in the water for six months.
She got through a two-week tryout and the coach told her she could stick around. She kept plugging away, and by the end of her first year, she had shaved a couple of seconds off that 500 free time. Sophomore year, a little more. Junior year, down to 5:45.
In other words, 10 seconds in three years. Not a lot. For scale, it takes about 5:20 to make the “B” final and score at the conference meet.
But her teammates, seeing her persistence, her willingness to stick it out and keep working at it, elected her a co-captain for her senior year.
She’s a relative rarity in swimming — someone who has made it through four years of early mornings and black-line fatigue even though she isn’t one of the best.
But out here in the real world, her story, I would guess, is more common.
Breakthroughs — sudden leaps forward — are rare. Most of us are not superstars. We keep plugging away, we put in the work, and hopefully we get a little better every day. Not enough to notice all the time, but at the end of several years, the progress is undeniable.
That’s what I’m celebrating Saturday. Leah, now 21, has done something hard and done it as well she could for a long time. She’s made dear friends and earned the respect of the other swimmers and her coaches.
At the pool, they’ll recognize her and the four other seniors. And then she’ll swim the 500 — not fast, as she’ll point out. They’re in the midst of a hard block of training for the conference meet next month. Maybe around 5:58, I’m guessing.
I wouldn’t miss it for anything.