USMS National Records – pool individual 4 lifetime
USMS Pool All American Honors – 17 years (20 individual)
USMS Long Distance All American Honors – 2 years (2 individual)
USMS Top Ten Achievements – 278 individual
My life in competitive swimming started when I was 10, at the suggestion of coaches at a sports “boot camp” where I essentially flunked the other five sports but was able to swim a 500-yard freestyle. After a couple years of summer swimming in Albuquerque, New Mexico, my family moved to New Delhi, India where I started “year-round” swimming. Our morning swim team practice started with us kids skimming the pool surface to remove an almost solid layer of locusts, crickets, dragonflies, and many other bugs that looked like cockroaches to me. Highlights of that year in India included my placing second in the 100 butterfly, freestyle, and backstroke in the Junior Girls category at the National Aquatic Championships and our 400-freestyle relay breaking the Indian national record.
After moving back to Albuquerque, I started swimming in earnest with an AAU team and my high school team, then enrolled at Arizona State University in 1975, swimming on the women’s team and making the 200 backstroke qualifying time for the Association for the 1976 Intercollegiate Athletics for Women Nationals (before women’s college athletics was part of the NCAA). Two of my ASU team-mates represented the United States at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal: Melissa Belote (who had won three gold medals at the 1972 Olympics) and Maryanne Graham (who set the American record in the 200 backstroke at 1976 Trials)—both women have swum or are currently swimming in USMS competitions, as is my college friend, teammate and roommate Karen Andrus-Hughes.
After 1976, I stuck to intermural inner tube water polo and lap swimming until after the birth of my second son in 1987, when I joined USMS with Maryland Masters. I carpooled to my first Masters meet with the legendary Nancy Brown (916 USMS Top Ten swims!) and her daughter Jill Springer. Between her beer relays, her swimming with a bouncy eyeball headband, and her energetic love of the sport, Nancy showed me how much fun Masters swimming really could be. I joined New England Masters in 2007, after I moved to Vermont.
Besides beer relays, other highlights of my aquatic adventures including my meeting my future husband while swimming laps at the University of Arizona, placing 5 th overall (1 st in women’s) in the 4.4-mile Chesapeake Bay Swim, watching my sons compete in all four years of collegiate swimming, having my older son also meet his future wife while swimming laps, breaking the 200 backstroke SCM world Masters record in my 30s and competing at the World Masters Championships in Montreal.
Outside of the pool, I had a career as a medical and science librarian, then worked as a Masters swim coach and at a fair-trade handicrafts store until I retired. Besides swimming, I serve on several of my town’s commissions, raise a large vegetable garden and try to see my three grandchildren as often as I can.