A Tribute to the PHS Swim Team
This essay was written for the Ken Rohenbach Scholarship led by the job service, and the writer received $2,000 to attend the University of Montana.
By Hope Morrison, alumnus of Polson High School and its swim team.
I watched our opportunity just slip away. Standing behind the block, screaming for my teammate to swim harder, my heart dropped to my stomach watching my relay lose the lead. After years and years of dedication to swimming, I was at the most critical and final meet of the season, watching my last event of the day, about to swim the final length of the girl’s 400 freestyle relay.
“You have to catch up, Hope, you’ve gotta! Sink or Swim Hope! Sink or-” screamed Aspen right as I dove off into the water. “Sink or Swim” had become our relay’s motto I came up with, meaning “All or Nothing”, that you had no choice but to give it everything you got, but for this upcoming race, I was going to need even more than “whatever was left in the tank,”.
I threw my arms as far ahead of me and as hard as I could, I kicked like a boat motor, and I was chasing that opportunity in front of me. But even on the first lap, everything inside was burning with pain.
I was already so exhausted, not just during that race, but with life in general. I was balancing Speech and Debate with swimming and had plenty of hardships affecting me at the same time. At the start of my swim season, I started having severe panic attacks when attending swim practice, irrationally thinking I was going to drown, and disappoint my coach, my teammates, and my parents. I would leave practice early to calm down, to only go to a chaotic home, where I’d either never see my parents or they were fighting with each other. School wasn’t much of a break for me either, I was falling apart in my classes, and getting unacceptable grades despite staying up till 2 am working on assignments. With all of this piling on, I was diagnosed with severe anxiety. I started counseling to deal with the pressures and worries, but it honestly didn’t get much better for a while.
I felt like I had no escape, nowhere to turn that wasn’t stressful or constant conflict, except for those relay members, those three other girls had always been there for me, constantly checking in and making sure I was okay, somewhat knowing the struggles I was going through. Every time I was gone, they’d happily welcome me back, and tell me they missed me. Those three were always a shoulder to cry on, people to laugh with, and to distract me from the trials of life. If it wasn’t for those girls, I wouldn’t have made it through that swim season.
My opportunity to win this final race was just slipping farther and farther ahead and every bit of me wanted to just take a rest, a rest from everything I had been dealing with, a rest from the pressure of the race, a rest where I just stopped swimming and sunk to the bottom of the pool. But with each breath was a reminder of why I was there, as I could hear the screams of my relay-mates, desperate for me to catch up. My teammates had worked so hard to get me to practice, to meets, to race in this relay, and the only way I could repay them would be to give it everything I had. It was “Sink or Swim”, and I had to swim.
At that moment I realized I wasn’t swimming to beat her, but I was swimming for my relay, for my team, and for everything I’ve worked so hard for, everything I’ve struggled with, everything that weighed me down cannot affect me in this race. I pushed for more than what was “left in the tank”, I spurred up and tried to generate as much energy as possible by thinking about all the people and moments that made me proud to be a part of my relay, not anxious.
“You have to catch up.” Her words echoed through my ears as I noticed as my opponent was right beside me. I needed everything and more. I pushed. I gritted my teeth. I screamed. I slammed my hand into the wall.
My team and I won that race by 0.07 seconds.
Afterward, I couldn’t pull myself out of that pool without help, but I was engulfed with euphoria hearing the cheers of my teammates and knowing that I had overcome the challenge of pushing myself through the pain, not just exhaustedly giving up and going to bed as my life had been lately.
We cheered and hugged each other, congratulating each other on a race well swam. As we walked over to see our coach together, I felt myself starting to cry. This time, however, wasn’t for all that I was struggling with, but instead all that we had accomplished. I hugged Aspen, the other senior swimmer on the team, and we cried together for one different reason.
Aspen and I had grown up together swimming on the club swim team, Lake Monsters. Since the development of Mission Valley Aquatic Center, it had always been the goal to create a swim team affiliated with Polson High School. With Aspen and a few others, we worked together to petition our school board to create a team, attended and presented at school board meetings, and created fundraisers across the community by selling potatoes, raking lawns, and participating in a swim-a-thon. The school board accepted our request, and by our sophomore year of high school, swimming was added to the roster of winter sports.
However, the first year wasn’t as successful as we had hoped, as only 3 other swimmers joined. We hardly placed well at meets, couldn’t compete in the relays, and missed out on a ton of school recognition because our team was simply so small. The next year the team grew bigger, but we still struggled to place and reach our full potential. But at that moment, after Aspen and I’s final race, we realized that the team we fought so hard to create had finally reached what we were hoping for in a team, and by our senior year, we had finally accomplished all of the goals we had since we were kids.
It was also a moment of clarity and appreciation of what kind of a program Polson High School’s swim team had become. Swimming has taught me countless lessons over the years, but it could also teach the same or different lessons to others. By pushing to create the swim program, we created opportunities for other students as well, like Josh Reed who didn’t even know how to swim when he joined the team on a whim, now he’s in the top 16 swimmers in his event! If others who struggled with life could find an escape in swimming, in a team, in a relay, then I had succeeded in making a positive impact on Polson High School.
I am applying for your scholarship today because I believe that I can represent Ken Rohrenbach’s ideology of overcoming adversity with a face of resilience. While I focused on my senior season of swimming today, I have so many other stories of challenges, from injuries in tennis, from enduring learning struggles to fighting anxiety, to share that represent different reasons why I am so passionate about making a difference in others' lives. My struggles have only made me more empathetic, and more caring for the challenges of others, and I want to become a shoulder to cry on like Aspen, Grace, or Dixie. I want to create positive change like how they created light at the end of the tunnel for me. Like my race, I hope to do more than whatever I've left in the tank,” and make a real difference in such a time of political discontent and division. Therefore, I hope to make this my life’s work, by achieving a degree in Political Science and Journalism.
Similar to petitioning for the swim team, I’ve also created two other petitions, have become a huge part of my school’s Board of Governors, led my yearbook team as an editor and the debate team as captain, interned at the local Lake County Commissioners office, and more, in order to achieve my overall goal of positive change.
Just like how I’ve pushed through the last few months of my life or the final stretch of that race, I will push to achieve a degree in Political Science, as I know the “getting out of the pool” moment will make it all worth it. To me, there’s no question if I can get through college, as I’ve worked my whole life for this moment and I made that decision: I chose to swim, and I’m not sinking any time soon.
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