50 Stories for 50 Years | Post 21
Swimming existed at the Naval Academy long before women did.
That mattered.
When I arrived in the summer of 1977, I already knew the water. Age-group swimming since I was eleven. Two-a-day practices in high school. The rhythm of yards and turns, and the particular silence of being underwater while the world above stayed loud. Of all the spaces at the Naval Academy, the pools were the ones I understood.
There were two of them. MacDonough Hall, where I swam on Sundays with my father. Norman Scott Natatorium, where I swam on weekday evenings throughout the winter with the Naval Academy Junior Swim Club. I learned quickly that a natatorium is just Latin for pool. It felt like wisdom to know this. It did not feel wise at USNA to have wet hair for Calculus at 7:55 in the morning, but that is sometimes the hand that is dealt.
From my plebe summer room in 7th Wing, I could see Norman Scott. My younger siblings would sometimes stand outside those windows, scanning for my face. They would wave frantically when we caught sight of each other.
To be accepted to the Naval Academy, I needed a waiver, a medical one, for legal blindness. The men’s swim coach, Lee Lawrence, was the only swim coach. He sponsored the waiver. I felt on top of the world.
What I didn’t fully grasp at the time was that Coach Lawrence had been handed an assignment, along with those few of us who arrived with actual competitive experience: build something. Cobble a team from whoever showed up. The women’s program didn’t have its own infrastructure. It had a coach who already had a job.
We took up two lanes. The men’s program took the rest.
My sophomore year, 1978–79, was the first year USNA Women’s Swimming achieved varsity status. I was a middling swimmer and a hard worker. Those are not the same thing, and in competitive swimming, the distinction becomes clear quickly.
Peggy Feldman was an All-American from the start. She was not middling. When the men’s team traveled to Key West, Florida, for Christmas training, two weeks over winter break, Peggy and I were the only two women who went. I remember being far from home for the holidays. I remember the yards. I remember it feeling like proof of something, though I couldn’t have named exactly what.
By the end of my junior year, I had earned my varsity letter. It had taken three years of two-a-days and wet hair and calculus and no escape from fall or spring marching.
I was done.
In my senior year, I auditioned for the winter musical. I got a part. When I told Coach Lawrence I wasn’t swimming that season, he was not pleased.
I understood. I was also not changing my mind.
The pool had given me what it had to give. The varsity letter was in my drawer. The water had been a place of refuge and even equalization, where what you could do mattered more than what rank you wore or what questions people had about whether you belonged. On the pool deck, the questions were simpler. Did you make the interval? Did you finish the set?
I had answered those questions for three years.
It was time for something else.
50 Stories for 50 Years of Women at the U.S. Naval Academy celebrates the 50th anniversary of women being admitted to the U.S. Naval Academy.