She was a part of me—a part I was terrified to be without.
Oh my goodness . . . I was so torn. For a while, it felt to me like I was the first person in the history of college athletics to find herself at these particular crossroads, but it was hardly unusual for a swimmer to change her training environment heading into an Olympic year. In fact, it’s quite common: Allison Schmitt, Cierra Runge, Simone Manuel, Katie Ledecky, Abbey Weitzeil . . . and those are just a few from this Olympic cycle alone! A lot of our top swimmers sit out or defer a year in order to prepare for an Olympic run. What I had in mind was nothing new.
I kept coming back to the fact that I wasn’t where I needed to be in terms of my fitness and training. We were headed into an Olympic year. I didn’t have the luxury of hanging back and crossing my fingers and hoping things would turn out okay, and my gut and my head and my heart kept telling me I was meant to be back in Colorado, sleeping in my own bed, surrounded by the love and support of family, and swimming once again with the coach who’d helped me to climb to the upper reaches of my sport, and doing my dry-land workouts with the trainer who’d helped to put me in the best shape of my life.
I’d talked to a few people privately about this, before I went to Teri. People close to the team and the sport, who knew the dynamics of that environment. I wanted to make sure I handled it in the right way, showing Teri the respect she deserved but at the same time letting her know that I had thought this through. Probably the worst thing I could have done was put it out there that this was something I was just kicking around, like I wanted Teri’s opinion, or needed to run something by her before making a decision. No, the thing to do was tell it to her straight, like ripping off a Band-Aid, but there was no good way to deliver the news. It was pretty much like, How can I make this situation the least horrible it could be? Because I knew it would be horrible. There was no avoiding it. And there was no avoiding the adverse effects my decision would have on my teammates, which was the worst feeling of all.
Whatever we’re doing, whatever goals we’re pursuing, we tend to take a narrow view. We look at the world from our own perspective—that’s just human nature, right? In my house, growing up, my parents made an extra effort to get me to see how my actions might impact others. When I got back from London and let it be known I was planning to swim senior year for my high school team, they pushed me to think how my role on the team would be viewed by others. That’s why I wasn’t totally surprised when those Christmas cookies arrived on our front door with that weirdly creepy note. We’d sat down and looked at it, every which way. There was a positive to it, and a negative, and it fell to me to consider both sides and find the right middle. My parents couldn’t help me with that. My friends couldn’t help me with that. They could take turns pointing out how it might come across, my continuing to compete for Regis after swimming for the US Olympic team in London. But, end of the day, it was on me.
Only, here at Berkeley, January of my sophomore year, the right middle wasn’t in the least bit apparent. What made sense for the team, for the program, didn’t necessarily make sense for me. And what was right for me wasn’t necessarily right for my coach, or for my teammates. This was that more-than-one-way-to-make-a-family, more-than-one-way-to-make-a-swimmer argument, on full display. It didn’t really occur to me that Teri would hear my news as some kind of slap in the face. Yeah, absolutely, I expected her to be surprised, saddened, maybe even disappointed. I was feeling some of those same emotions myself. We’d been through a lot together, and had been looking ahead to a whole lot more.
In many ways, it was Teri herself who’d empowered me to think along these lines in the first place. Remember, her focus was to develop us not only as swimmers but as strong, independent women, able to make tough decisions and think for ourselves. It was one of her great strengths as a coach, and I’d taken that message very much to heart. And here I was, thinking for myself that this was the approach I needed to take.
My plan was to meet with Teri personally. I’d worked the whole conversation through in my head, rehearsed it every which way. But then I sent her a note and told her I wanted to meet with her to talk about my training plans for the coming year, and she hit me right back and said she was free in five minutes and to give her a call. It’s like the conversation had a momentum all its own. I didn’t know what to do, so I called, thinking we could set a time to meet, but when she answered I got right into it. I just put it out there, and what came back . . . well, it was more than I expected. You see, Teri and I were looking at this decision from two very different perspectives. Me, I was thinking of my own career. I cared deeply about my teammates, make no mistake, but I was also determined to return to that Olympic stage and continue what I’d started at the London games. Teri was of course thinking what this move would mean to her program. Absolutely, my leaving would send a signal to my teammates, to the swimming community. It might make it harder for Teri to recruit, because now she’d have to explain to prospective swimmers why I’d left the program. It might make it harder for us to coalesce as a team, because my teammates would know I had a foot out the door. It might jeopardize Teri’s chances to serve as a coach for the Olympic team, because a lot of times those invitations go to coaches of the high-profile swimmers who are going to the games.
Mostly, it suggested that I wasn’t happy at Cal, when, really, that couldn’t have been further from the truth. I was super close with Teri, and the girls on the team, and I wouldn’t have done anything to hurt them. We were a family. I was connected at the hip with my best friend and roommate, Kristen, and with my core group at AIA—those relationships meant the world to me. But at the same time my focus was on upping my game, and finding a way to improve my times, get back to that level of peak performance I’d had going into London. I really thought it was better for me to swim with Todd, to swim at altitude, to train with Loren, to live at home, where I could keep my distractions to a minimum.
MOM: Missy wasn’t expecting to have this conversation with Teri on the phone. We talked about it, and we were all in agreement. This was something Missy needed to discuss with her coach face-to-face, away from the team. But that’s not exactly how it happened, and I know Missy was broken up about it. There’s so much that gets lost over the telephone, especially when you’re delivering a difficult piece of news. The emotions are lost, or bent out of shape. You can’t really get a good read on the other person. And Missy just felt awful about it, the way it happened. She called home that night, and she was so upset. With Missy, she was always good about taking responsibility for her own decisions. When she was a little girl, and she’d have to talk to a coach or a teacher, Dick and I encouraged her to do so on her own. She didn’t need her parents to advocate for her. But when she told me how the conversation went with Teri, I wished I could have been in the room with her, holding her hand, letting her know that things would work out in the end. It might have been difficult in the moment, but she needed to hear that it was going to be okay.
Meanwhile, we were still in the middle of our season. No one on the team had any idea what was going on—not yet. I’d told my roommate, Kristen, because I knew there was no way I was getting through this alone, and one other coach on the team, because I wanted to get some advice on how to approach Teri, but other than that it was business as usual. I showed up for practice the next morning not knowing what to expect. I gave Teri a wide berth, and she seemed to do the same with me. It’s like neither one of us wanted to confront or engage with the other. One of the things we’d talked about in that endless phone conversation the day before had been how and when to let the team know, and together we’d agreed that there was no reason to say anything until after the NCAAs. Neither one of us wanted to put our team chemistry at risk. That would have broken me, more than anything else.
But people pick up on things. In a team setting, a family-type environment like the one Teri had built, you develop a kind of radar. The group dynamic is palp
able, knowable. You spend so much time together, it’s like you’re wired in the same ways. You can sense when things are a little off, a little different. And here some of the captains picked up on that. They saw it in my body language, in the subtle change to how I responded to reporters when I was giving interviews. Someone asked what I was doing after the NCAAs and I said I wasn’t thinking about that now—an innocent answer to an innocent question. But my teammates heard that and their ears perked up. Typically, I’d take a question like that and say, “I’m just gonna keep on doing what I’m doing.” But this one little shift got them thinking, and out of that they got to talking, and out of that . . . well, it wasn’t too hard for everyone to start to think something was going on. We were a team-first sort of group, so this wasn’t really an issue, except, of course, for me, because I was so concerned about doing or saying anything to upset the program in any way.
A lot of girls took my decision to mean I was abandoning the team, but that was the absolute last thing I wanted to do. I’d always been a team-first kind of athlete. All you had to do was look at all the off-events I’d been swimming for the team to know that this wasn’t me. But there’s no denying that a collegiate swimming environment isn’t necessarily the best place for an athlete hoping to swim in the Olympics, especially leading into an Olympic year. Of course, many other swimmers had done well in this situation, but I didn’t think it was right for me this time around. There are completely different agendas at play. At a school like Cal, when you get into the championship season, you start to taper in the beginning of February. You come back for the Pac-12s, and then you taper again for the national championships. It’s a whole different schedule, a whole different approach. It works out to about two months of training in the six months leading up to Olympic trials that are completely skewed toward the college team. That’s great for the team, but it’s not always so great for the individual athlete. And Teri, to her credit, was well aware of this. To counter it, her plan that year was to send her postgraduate swimmers to the South Pacific for a month to work with one of our stroke coaches, to keep pushing them. That might have been a great solution for a lot of swimmers, but I didn’t think it would be so great for me. I felt uncomfortable going to a whole new environment for an entire month, four months out from Olympic trials, doing a new kind of training. There was too much at stake, I thought. And it’s not like we were going across town—it was halfway across the world, so I worried about my body clock and all these other variables. (Plus, it’s not like my last trip to that part of the world had gone all that well!) The more I thought about it, the more firm I was in my thinking. I needed to be home, in my childhood bedroom, eating my familiar foods, reaching back for the familiar routines that had taken me all the way to the London games.
Meanwhile, we still had the balance of our season in front of us. I’ve kind of foreshadowed this part of the story in the “moment” leading up to this chapter, so I’ll cut right to it: the NCAAs that year was the best short-course meet I ever swam in my life. I couldn’t have asked for a better way to end my collegiate career. I went best times in all of my events, in some cases by seconds! I was over the moon with how I did, but none of that would have mattered if my teammates weren’t right there with me, swimming their own best times, putting together the best short-course meets of their careers. We ended up winning the whole thing (Go Bears!), and for a few moments in there, while we were celebrating our national championship (Go Bears!), I could forget the tension and uncertainty that had followed me around the pool since I’d told Teri I was leaving. We could come together and celebrate what we’d all accomplished (once more, because you can never have enough, Go Bears!), and in the middle of all that hugging and whooping it up find a way to acknowledge that we’d been good for each other and for the program.
(In case I haven’t made myself clear how I felt about all this . . . one last Go Bears!)
DAD: It wouldn’t be right for Missy to boast about her accomplishments in the pages of her own book, but I don’t think anyone could fault her dear old dad for singing her praises. Out of that season, she was received the Honda Cup as the nation’s top female college athlete, and she was up against the top athletes in every sport—basketball, volleyball, gymnastics, soccer. She’d helped to lead her team to a national championship, and coming out of that horrific injury in Australia this was all the more impressive. If you’d have asked me on the morning after that long first night in Queensland, when her mother and I stayed up with Missy in her hotel room, if there was any way she could have come back and finished her season on such a tremendous high note, I would have looked at you like you had a screw loose. She was in such excruciating pain that night, I caught myself thinking her career might be over. I wasn’t even worried about her career, frankly. I just wanted to help her manage the pain, she was in such agony. But somehow Missy was able to power past this injury and will herself back to fighting shape and find a way to help her teammates to a national title. That’s something, don’t you think? She still wasn’t where she needed to be, in terms of regaining the form and the strength to compete for another Olympic medal, but she’d made some great progress. And now that she was coming home, now that she’d be reunited with her longtime coach, now that her mother would be cooking for her and catering to her every need, we all felt it was time for Missy’s star to shine, shine, shine once again.
Gee, thanks, Dad. I’m glad you were so sure things would work out. Me? It took some time, together with a lot of prayerful reflection. And some second-guessing. I’ve got to be honest here, I was in a hard place when I came back home. Physically, I still wasn’t where I wanted to be, coming off my back injury. Emotionally, I was shaken, torn. It’s tough to go from a club environment to a college environment and then back to a club environment, and I don’t mean to suggest that I’m not grateful for the teammates I have now on the Colorado Stars—they’re a blast to swim with, and we raise one another’s games every time we get into the pool. But it’s not the same as having the emotional support of twenty-five of your closest friends, every single day. It’s not the same as having a national championship in your sights, a shared goal you can work toward together, all season long. It’s not the same as living, breathing, eating, with your teammates with this great sense of common purpose, the way it can be when you’re in the bubble of a college sports season.
In the beginning, it’s not like my days were all that different. Some of my closest friends from high school were home from college over the summer, so there were happy distractions all around as I resumed my training schedule with Todd. There were other taking-care-of-business-type distractions, too. Choosing an agent (shout-out to Mark Ervin, who within months had already become a huge part of our family, and the amazing team he’s put together at William Morris Endeavor–IMG!); meeting with sponsors (so proud to represent my great new friends at Speedo, GoPro, Visa, United Airlines, Wheaties, and Minute Maid!); and helping to promote causes and programs that held great meaning for me (honored to be an ambassador for the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation and USA Swimming Foundation!).
But by August 2015, most everyone I knew was drifting back to college, and there was just me and my parents and my new routines with Todd and the Colorado Stars. Intellectually, I knew this would be a dramatic change, and I could kind of see it coming. Only, I didn’t really see it coming. One day I looked up and saw that all my good friends from home were back at school, moving on with their lives. And all my good friends at Cal were back in Berkeley, moving on with their lives. I was moving on with mine, of course, doing what I needed to do to prepare for Rio, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling like I was stuck in place. It snuck up on me, this feeling, and it took a few weeks for me to get into my new routines, and to accept that my Cal Bears teammates were going on with their routines without me.
MOM: I don’t want to get too far away from the business aspect of Missy’s career, because her father and I were so enormously im
pressed with the way she conducted herself during this transition period. She was a full participant in our search for an agent. In fact, I think it’s fair to say she even took the lead in this search. She was so busy with her academics and swimming, and there were a dozen agents in contact with us. There were a lot of balls in the air, so Missy asked us to take the first round of meetings and help her bring the list down to four. Missy was as involved as any of us. It was a huge decision! And it was her decision to make. We could only give her our opinion, but it came down to Missy in the end. That’s how it should be, yes? This was her life, her career, so Dick and I took the same approach we took when she started swimming. We took that all-important step back and let Missy do her thing. She kept saying her goal wasn’t just to find an agent to help her with this phase of her career. She was looking for an agent for life. And she knew she found it with Mark Ervin. Right away, she knew. In Mark, she saw someone who shared her values, who would help her align with sponsors who also shared these same values. And Dick and I could only agree, because Mark was really the perfect person for her. He saw what Missy saw, what we all saw. That there was great value in staying true to who you are and what you believe in. As a professional, Missy could only be herself. She couldn’t stand behind a product or a cause she didn’t wholeheartedly believe in. She wouldn’t be who she was, and Mark understood this. He understood that Missy needed to be in the pool, working hard to achieve her dreams, and building on her success as a swimmer to inspire others to achieve their dreams, too. Sponsorship deals, endorsements, other opportunities, either they’d come to Missy on the back of that ideal, or they wouldn’t, and Missy was okay with that. We were all okay with that.
Relentless Spirit Page 22
