Member 2000 - Present
2023 - Colonies Zone “Dot” Award
2022 - USMS Dorothy Donnelly Service Award
2009-2011 - NELMSC Chair
2011-2021 - NELMSC Treasurer
2008 – Member USMS Communications Committee
NELMSC Fitness Chair
NEM VP of Communications
USMS Certified Coach – Level 1
My first memories of swimming are from Long Pond in Lakeville, MA where my grandparents had a lake house. After having learned to swim there circa 1978, I amazed/horrified my parents by swimming around Nelson Island, a distance just shy of a mile. Not bad for a 10-year-old with no other swimming experience, though far from safe.
Since I was forbidden from doing that again, and my mother had no urge to put me on a swim club, my next flirtation with swimming occurred in college. One of my fraternity brothers, Vinnay, asked for volunteers to do the intramural swim meet. Again, I surprised everyone by scoring points in all my races (freestyle only since I had no clue how to do anything else). By the end of college, I could score in the top three of all those events and even took second in the 200 free. All of this in the "OLD WPI Pool", a 20 yarder under the old Alumni Gymnasium. That was January of 1990.
10 years later, I was flirting with Triathlons, and swimming at lunchtime with my work friend, Matt Camelio. Shortly after our nearby pool closed, Matt announced to me he had found a Masters team nearby and bonus: They had EVENING workouts. And so in January of 2000, I drove onto Hanscom Air Force Base for the first time and joined Minuteman Masters. Between Rich Axtell, Marc Broudy, Rick Battistini, and many others early on, I received awesome coaching, learned to do all the strokes, and competed at the Harvard Meet for the first time that very spring as well as Nationals that summer.
Within a few years I had finally started losing weight, got healthier and was in a much better place personally. I knew I wanted to give back to the sport that was helping me so much, so when Tom Lyndon asked me to write a monthly column in the NEM News newsletter, I agreed. That set me on an arc to more and more service to the greater New England and National organization. Eventually, I would go on to hold more offices and positions than I can remember at this point.
Though I had to step back from that level of volunteering to help family members in more recent years, I still swim 3-4 times per week and even host a small workout group at my lake house. As I write this, we have just boosted our morning swims from 1.4 miles to about 2. If my poor late mother only knew.