By Holly D’Addio, Harbor News Sports Writer
Old Saybrook’s Nicole Rhodes
has done almost everything to exceed in her swimming career, from
changing high schools to overcoming a potentially major health setback,
only to have the biggest breakthrough swimming season of her career
this past year.
Nicole started swimming at age six
at Valley Shore YMCA, starting with swim lessons and eventually joining
the Marlins swim team for five years.
“I can tell you that it was always
hard to be a swimmer,” says Nicole. “No one at school was a swimmer
because most of my friends either did soccer or some other sport so I
was the only one. It was a unique sport, but I didn’t care—I loved it
and stuck with it.”
Nicole started swimming
competitively at age eight, qualifying for states and even seniors when
she was 13 (the average age to qualify for seniors is 15). She defied
the odds, beating times she wasn’t expected to excel at and thriving in
the backstroke—her best stroke.
Four years ago, Nicole joined the
USA Swim Team, namely the Central Connecticut Aquatic Team (CCAT), and
began to train hardcore from December through the summer with only a
few weeks off in between. She started high school her freshman year at
Old Saybrook High School but transferred to Mercy High School in
Middletown her sophomore year so she could swim year-round. In her
first varsity season at Mercy last year, she made it to sectionals, was
All-State in the 100 backstroke, and placed seventh in the 100
backstroke in the Open.
Right after her Mercy swim season
ended last fall, Nicole was diagnosed with Wolff Parkinson White
Syndrome—a condition where one has an extra pathway leading to the
heart—and experienced a few scary episodes before she was told she
needed surgery to correct it.
“I got out of the pool after a
couple laps and my heart would speed up and it was just so scary,” says
Nicole. “I had surgery last November and the recovery wasn’t as quick
as I had hoped, but I just needed the time to heal. I was back in the
pool two weeks later because I couldn’t miss
another minute.”
Nicole began her training regimen
once again for the USA Team, despite her slight disadvantage, which
clearly didn’t stop her. She qualified for sectionals in Indiana last
year—an amazing feat after a season that started with heart surgery. In
her 15- to 18-year-old age group, she placed first in the 100
backstroke—a personal best for Nicole after she had dropped her time
3.5 seconds—and placed second in the 200 backstroke
after dropping her time 6.5 seconds in that race.
“I love my USA Team so much, it’s
just such a legit, hardcore swim team,” says Nicole. “I eat, sleep, and
swim, that’s all I do, and I wouldn’t change it so it was the logical
thing for me to do to get right back up after surgery and continue to
swim. Placing that high, for me, was so unreal. I worked extremely
hard—I knew it would be an important year with coaches watching me and
a lot of pressure for college and I knew I had a slight disadvantage
with just having surgery.”
This kind of dedication and perseverance can only bring more success to Nicole’s swimming
future, and Nicole has no plans of stopping anytime soon.
“I just know that whatever college I
want to go to, I have to be on a swim team,” says Nicole. “It’s so
important to me and such a big part of my life that I wouldn’t give it
up for anything.”