FWEET…TAKE your mark…Bang! My heart raced as I quickly swam stroke after stroke. I looked beside me. I was falling behind. I swam faster and faster. Slap! I looked at the display board. I had beaten my personal best time! I was dead tired, but adrenaline pumped through my whole body and kept me energetic. A smile of joy was evident on my face.
The months of training felt worth it for those 30 seconds of bliss. I had just shaved off 0.05 seconds off my 50m Freestyle best time! In a swimmer’s mind, nothing beats the feeling of working so hard for months to shave off a few milliseconds off our best times.
Despite the thrill that swimming brought me, a defining moment in my career was realizing that I could only go so far in my sport. Back in high school, my peers in the team were quitting the sport one by one, giving me the idea that my time in swimming was almost up. At that point, after investing hours and hours of training time, when do I say that it’s over?
Moreover, according to data from the United States National Collegiate Athletic Association (US NCAA), only 6.13% or around one in every 16 high school varsity athletes successfully become college varsity players. More glaring is the fact that only 0.05% or one in every 2,000 high school varsity athletes make it to professional or national team squads. That means a vast majority of us have to go through that decision one way or another.
My decision was finally made in Grade 10 when I realized that I wasn’t going to be part of that 6.13%. After finishing in the middle of the pack in every competition I joined, I reached a point when I lost motivation to continue pouring my heart out in training. At that point, I decided to quit swimming and to shift my attention to other things that I was more talented in.
However, just like most former athletes, I could not leave the world of sports completely. Four years ago, in my college freshman year, I found a new passion in sports journalism. After being an athlete for most of my life, I was mesmerized by the inspiring stories that sports journalists conveyed in their works. I wanted to produce inspiring works like that. What fueled my passion the most was to be able to show the human side of athletes that were usually glossed over by many fans. I wanted to tell people about the blood, sweat, and tears that athletes shed to reach the pinnacle of athletic competition.
Looking back at my swimming career still brings me joy and nostalgia. Sometimes I would have vivid dreams of staring at the lane line and swimming my heart out during a race. Other times, I would remember those Friday training sessions where we usually did something fun as a team.
However, I have moved on now. The competitiveness, the drive to win, and the hunger for excellence that I developed through swimming has now turned into key traits in producing quality articles and chasing tight deadlines. Sports journalism has now become my way of giving back to sports and inspiring others through storytelling. I may never be the athletic star that I dreamed of becoming, but through sports journalism, I can now be the wind that clears the sky for people to see those stars.
