February 29, 2024 | FEATURES | By Kole Petersen
This past weekend, after touching the wall for my final event at this year’s Swimming and Diving Championships for the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference (SCAC), I officially completed my first season as a collegiate swimmer. Despite swimming slower than my best time in that last event and not placing as high as I would have hoped, I was still incredibly grateful for the opportunity to compete in the sport I love at a collegiate level. As we rode on the bus to a banquet hall to celebrate our success, I began to reflect on how I even got here in the first place. As I looked back on the journeys I undertook in not just athletics, but in life in general, those feelings of thankfulness increased.
People with disabilities have a much harder time adjusting to and being included in the wider world’s activities. As I touched upon in my article about Individualized Education Programs, disabled individuals are actively prevented from accessing the educational needs that they deserve, inhibiting their ability to learn alongside their peers and gain the skills they need to survive in a world led by neurotypicals. Generally speaking, the feeling of being ignored by the people and systems that are supposed to help them cause disabled people to lose confidence in their own abilities and feel inferior to their non-disabled counterparts, making them feel unworthy of the inclusion they so desperately want.
As an autistic person, I have felt ostracized by the world around me for a disability I cannot control. I saw the world in a different way than my peers, and because of this, I struggled to find people who understood and accepted my differences. I’ve felt like I could not be my true self in a world molded by an ideology that did not allow for neurodivergent schools of thought, so I forced myself to fit into that mold however I could.
Starting in elementary school, I studied the behaviors of the people around me, mirrored their mannerisms, and learned their figures of speech to become “normal.” However, even after years of trying to change my neurodivergence, I was unsuccessful on this quest to be like everyone else. No matter how hard I tried, underneath all my masks, I was still autistic, a major part of myself I began to see as a hindrance.
But I did have one aspect of my life that seemed to accept and respect who I am: the world of swimming.
I have participated in a wide variety of sports throughout my life, from youth basketball and T-ball, to tumbling and triathlons, yet competitive swimming was the thing that finally made me feel normal. Instead of being classified as different from people my age and being sent to “special” classes, I was able to participate in practices and compete at meets the same way everyone else on the team was. Instead of being judged by my disability, I was being judged by my abilities in the sport. I was able to carry the confidence that I felt in the water into other aspects of my life. By the time I started high school, I found myself much more comfortable with my identity and far more capable of talking to and relating with my peers.
Unfortunately, for the first two years of high school, I found myself on a team with an incredibly toxic culture who prioritized making fun of my autism outside of the water. Judgment was forcefully brought into the atmosphere in which I sought relief from that ridicule. I eventually found the courage to leave that team, but the lingering worries and insecurities brought about from my time on this team made me question my future in sports altogether. Swimming in college had always been a goal of mine, but if ridicule had followed me into high school swimming, who knows what would carry over into college?
However, I did not want to end up as a mere statistic, as one of the many autistic individuals who gave up on their dreams because of societal pressures. I knew that very few disabled athletes went on to compete in college (a 2007 survey found that only 2.7% of collegiate athletes have a learning disability), so I wanted to prove to myself more than anything that I am capable of overcoming the odds. To me, there was no reason I could not continue this trend in college.
Thankfully, the beginning of my experience as a collegiate athlete was very welcoming. My teammates understood that I am autistic yet did not infantilize me nor treat me differently because of it. I very quickly became just another member of the swim and dive family, laughing alongside everyone else at team meals in “Rast’s” and cracking jokes in between sets at practices. Nevertheless, I still had some doubts about whether the team treated me this way out of necessity or out of true compassion.
Flashing forward to our mid-season invitational, I was talking with a senior on the team in between races, when the topic turned to autism. The conversation came up when talking about a recent alum of the team who was also autistic. I opened up about the struggles I had faced in the public school system from being autistic and how important it was to me to be a proud self-advocate, thinking that he would merely recognize my experiences and move on. However, he showed a level of understanding and empathy that I could have never expected, an incredible display of behavior that proved the degree to which I was truly accepted in this space.
Thanks to that conversation, I feel safer than ever to be a part of this amazing team, a feeling I still am not entirely used to, but incredibly grateful for. Being a collegiate athlete has brought me a level of happiness, community, and fulfillment I have never found anywhere else, and to that I cannot adequately explain my thankfulness. Prior to high school, swimming was the space where I felt the most normal, and I am so happy that I have been able to find that same sense of inclusion and belonging in the Big Cat family. Although the landscape of this team will be changing with the retirement of our head coach, Anne Goodman James, I have full confidence that the community that our team has built will continue to showcase The welcomeness, inclusiveness, and passion that has come to define my first year as a CC swimmer.