So, I grew up in a neighborhood where there was no city park, no playground, or anything of the sort, so there was really nothing to do in the way of sports or to have fun. Also, it was a rather dangerous neighborhood and I was accident prone anyway, so it was probably for the best. I wasn’t the outdoors type anyway. Then I got to high school and started swimming. This was a big transition from doing no sport to doing something of such high intensity.

When you’re me; that is, a person of African-American decent; you get asked a lot of questions. The most common ones were, “Can you even swim?,” or, “Why don’t you play basketball?,” or, along the same lines, “Why don’t you play football?” Well, my answer was always the same. I wanted to do a sport that wasn’t typical of the things that people in my family or my friends did. No one really swam, so I thought it would be a chance for me to stand out, not only as an athlete, but also as a chance to break a stereotype that African-Americans don’t swim. I always thought it would be easy to learn how to swim, but it was so rough. However, it turns out I was, as my coach put it, “a natural fish.” There was never any decision I was happier with than choosing to swim, but with it I learned three very important lessons.

First of all, get used to constantly smelling like chlorine. It doesn’t matter what soap you use, how many showers you take, or even if you haven’t swum in a couple weeks because you’re in between seasons, you will constantly have that lingering smell on something that you own or another.

The second thing I learned is that if you want to be good at swimming, one practice a day is never enough. You have to wake up, trudge out of bed at 4:30 in the morning, and try to get through the morning practices, school, and afternoon practices without collapsing from being exhausted. No one said swimming, or really sports in general, was ever going to be easy.

The third lesson, which was probably the most important one I learned, is that you can dislike people off of the pool deck, you can have any issues with the person in question, but once you step on that deck, you are teammates above all else. You have to support each other, work towards a common goal, and you can’t let anything else get in your way. Swimming is a team sport just as much as it is an individual sport. While it’s you against the clock to get faster, or it’s you and your team against another one. No matter what, you win and lose together as a whole, even though you have to be proud of the fact that you did well on an individual level.

So, I decided to do an atypical sport, and I feel in love with it. The lessons I’ve learned will probably follow me forever. Furthermore, it gave me the chance to do a sport that wouldn’t make me a stereotype and I think that for me, that made all the difference.