2020 Inducted into the New England LMSC Hall of Fame (Contributor)
1999-2003 NEM News article producer – The Self-Coached Swimmer
1997-2001 Open Water Event Director – Swim Like A Rock (First NEM open water event)
1994-2001 Check-Off Challenge Coordinator
1994 NELMSC Sanctions Chair
1993-1996 NEM President
1991-1997 NEM Executive Committee
1985 USMS Long Course Nationals at Brown – Awards
1983-2005 Meet Director (Phillips Exeter, Medford High School, Cedardale, Rosemary Pool, Manchester YMCA)
1983 March NEM News The Grillis – One of NEM’s Swimming Couples
USMS Top Ten – 1 relay
Club: New England Masters (NEM)
After high school, David Grilli was working in laborious jobs that kept him active and ergo thin. After five years, he decided to study engineering at Northeastern University. A few months of sedentary study made him realize he needed physical activity. So, he went to the pool. “I could barely swim a lap without hyperventilating,” he recalled, but he persisted. “And before long, I could finish 500 yards without stopping.”
Swimming was sheer pleasure, and sometime later, “I met my beloved Tracy. She told me that Masters Swimming existed and I should give it a try,” he says. At his first mini-meet, he met “the gregarious Tom Lyndon. Tom made this newbie feel very welcome and I was hooked. I got quite a bit better but was never competitive with my peers.” This led to the realization that David was a fitness swimmer, and attending swim meets was motivational and social.
“Since I couldn’t make a splash with swimming performances, I figured I would help in other ways,” he says. “Along with my wife Tracy, we got good at organizing and running mini-meets. We ran the Exeter meet for 18 years straight. We also ran open water swims and organized a Masters party or two.”
“Enjoying the social aspects of my Masters comrades, I got even more involved with governance. I was elected president of NEM for a two-year term and represented NELMSC at the USMS national convention nine years in a row.”
Alongside swimming and volunteering, David also became a coach and ran a Masters workout at a local pool. “I got a great sense of accomplishment from helping other swimmers,” he says. Soon afterwards, he began coaching a high school swim team, “or future Masters swimmers as I like to refer to them.”
David and his wife Tracy also started a workout group in Londonderry, NH that has “blossomed nicely over the past 20 years,” he says. In all, “Masters swimming has been a defining point in my life. I couldn’t have gone without it.”