From hating swimming to winning 10 medals, Allison Schmitt uses life story to give advice

A future Olympic gold medalist was once the slowest kid in the pool.

“I hated swimming,” Allison Schmitt tells USA TODAY Sports.

Schmitt wasn’t even 10, and she was ready to quit. Why she didn’t, why she continued on her path to set an American record at the 200-meter freestyle, came down to one simple reason: She met a friend at the end of her first season.

That friend, Monica Blaesser, became her best friend. You are never really alone if you have one.

“If I hadn't gone to back to another season of swimming, I definitely would not be sitting here talking to you today,” says Schmitt, who went on to win 10 Olympic medals at the sport.

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Girls are twice as likely to stop playing sports by age 14 as boys. Now retired from swimming, Schmitt is an honorary officer for SURGE, a BSN Sports initiative that empowers girls to stay with sports. She uses her life story as a model.

The American swimmer’s career, which spanned four Olympic Games, was a slow progression of building on failures and learning to rely on the support of her friends and loved ones during her darkest times.

Schmitt has experienced the invigorating highs of training with Michael Phelps and the sinking depths of depression. She has endured the suicide of her cousin, April Bocian, another promising young female athlete like herself.

“If she could have just seen how many people loved her,” Schmitt says.

Schmidt, 34, spoke with USA TODAY Sports about how she has found support throughout her athletic career and how she is helping younger female athletes discover they have it, too.

(Questions and responses are edited for length and clarity.)

You don't have to be good at a sport right away. First find your connection to it.

Schmitt was the middle child sandwiched between an older brother and sister and two younger sisters. She tagged along to all of her siblings’ sporting event and began swimming as a matter of convenience.

She stayed in it because she found a reason to keep going back to the pool.

USA TODAY: When did you start swimming full time and how did you know it was the right time?

Allison Schmitt: I started swimming at 9. My oldest sister (Kirsten) didn't like contact sports or ball sports so she decided to swim. I kind of followed her. My parents instilled in us that when we committed to a team or committed to a sport, we had to follow through with the whole season. Soccer was my No. 1 sport and I liked that communication and team camaraderie a lot. Swimming didn't really have that for me, because I was splitting so much time between other sports and when you're at practice, you're the slowest person in the pool; you don't really get much rest if your face is in the water and basically you're just swimming to survive. (Laughs.)

I did finish out the season and at my last meet, I met Monica. She was my only friend the entire season. I got in the car and I told my sister, “I met a friend.” The whole reason I signed up for another season of swimming was so that I could find out what this girl's name was and tell my sister.

USAT: So after that, swimming was more fun for you?

AS: I became more involved and I met friends in swimming. At 12 years old, I didn't make the travel soccer team that I wanted to make and I decided to focus on swimming. It all started to come together in high school. And from then on, it was kind of like a ladder of success for me, leading into 2008 (the Beijing Olympics), at 18 years old.  I definitely was not an overnight success. I've had a lot of losses and a lot of participation awards. It was years of hard work and great coaching and sacrifices.

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'Back and forth in a box': Your family, and your teammates, can be your engines for success

"Swimming doesn’t sound that fun," Schmitt says. "You're swimming back and forth in a box following a black line for at least two hours out of the day. But what I really loved about it was the teammates that I made in it. And that's kind of what kept me going through it all."

So did her family. Gail and Ralph Schmitt let their kids try any sport they wanted as long as they went to church, got good grades and played a musical instrument.

Derek, Allison's older brother, played high school lacrosse and ice hockey but went on to swim and coach at the Division I level. Her twin sisters, Kari and Sara, played high school basketball and reached Division I in hockey.

Allison found herself swimming alongside an Olympic legend. Phelps was from her home state of Michigan. The two began training together in 2005, and he opened her eyes to the mental side of sports.

USAT: Talk about your family and how supportive they’ve been.

AS: When my little sisters were born, my oldest sister was a month and a half shy of 6. There were five of us 5 and under. I honestly don't know how my parents did it. They were driving 40,000 miles a year around to practices, games, whatever that was, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on food, fees, travel equipment and such. But besides giving us those opportunities, they provided a stable and loving environment: sitting in the stands and being that biggest cheerleaders, driving us back and forth from practice, leaving the coaching to the coaches. I think that those behaviors that we watched growing up I have naturally brought into my adult life.

We ate as a family and there were nights where we'd be eating at 9 or 10 p.m. Or I'd come back for practice and have a plate waiting for me. I don't really recall stopping at fast food restaurants on the way home. I feel like I always had a nutritious meal at home. And I knew my family was there to eat and laugh with and have story time with at dinnertime.

USAT: What have you learned about sports and competition training with Phelps?

AS: He’s five years older than me. I've seen him swimming in Michigan as a high school athlete and just watching that, I saw the power of the mind and visualization and really driving toward a dream and a goal. I never really looked at him as that greatest Olympian of all time but just as another human being. And I think that I was able to see both the superhuman part and everyone else sees on TV and but I was also, I saw the human in him as well and the sacrifice that he put into every day.

Coach Steve: Some parents need to rethink how they talk to their child athletes

'Being vulnerable is a superpower': Be open about your mental health issues

Schmitt won a bronze medal as part of the American 4x200-meter relay team in Beijing. She medaled five times, winning three golds, at the 2012 London Games, setting a then-Olympic record at the women’s 200-meter freestyle.

Then she began to feel the weight of expectations. When she didn't qualify for the 2013 world championships, she began to question herself. She felt she had disappointed her coaches, her teammates, her university (Georgia) and her country. She spiraled into depression.

But she returned to win four more medals over the next two Olympics and earn a master’s degree in social work from Arizona State. It’s a lesson she wants to leave with young female athletes.

USAT: Talk about the importance of mental health.

AS: I think athletes so often lose their voice in sport, especially female athletes, because our bodies are different, or we're not relating to someone. I think it's very important to show that vulnerability because being vulnerable is a superpower. If you're able to be vulnerable, you're able to learn more, you're able to get more tools for your own toolbox. One of my biggest messages is even with experiencing mental health issues, you are still able to be successful. It is OK to not be OK. But it is not OK to isolate. The hardest step in a mental health journey is reaching out and getting help and then staying in help.

USAT: How have you learned to manage your mental health issues?

AS: I continue to go to therapy and that doesn't mean that I don't experience hard days, it doesn't mean that my depression doesn't come back up, my anxiety. I definitely have those days but on those days, instead of isolating because I'm embarrassed about it or because I recognize that this isn't me, (I recognize) that it's OK to be like that and we're human and we can have all these different emotions. Instead of isolating, reach out and lean on the support of your support system. I think that when I realized that I was probably 25 years old at my cousin's funeral; she committed suicide a week after her 17th birthday and a few days before prom, right before she was going on to play Division I basketball in college.

I saw all the people that showed up at her funeral, from friends, from family, from school (in Pennsylvania), from basketball, from neighboring teams from Ohio, Michigan that came to the funeral. And if she could have just felt the love from all of that, I think things could have been different.

'A happy swimmer is a fast swimmer': Understand the unique issues that can confront a female athlete

Susan Riley, senior director of brand marketing for BSN Sports, says research indicates the motivating factors for coaching girls and boys are distinctly different.

“Boys tend to strive to perform well in order to receive encouragement or praise,” she says. “Girls need encouragement and praise from the get-go to perform at their best.”

To coach a female athlete, and to understand a female athlete, you also need to be prepared to talk about the female-specific issues that may confront her.

SURGE, which was launched in March and has reached more than 250,000 girls who play sports in the USA, offers free online resources (including webinars from Schmitt) to help coaches navigate those issues and build self-esteem in girls.

USAT: Why do you think female athletes are quitting at twice the rate of boys?

AS: You can go from the biological aspects of your menstrual cycle and just not having had education or the resources to really control that, especially in the sport of swimming. I mean, period anxiety is real in all sports, in all females. It comes from sitting on a white couch to wearing white shorts to playing a sport where you're in a bathing suit. Period anxiety is just very real and so how can we talk about these sensitive topics, especially if it's a male coach to a female athlete, as well as body image. We can't deny the fact that social media is huge and there's a lot that's posted out there, and it can't be really controlled of what's real or what's not real. There’s a lot of editing. People look at that as a reality when it's really photoshopped, or it could be their reality when there's a whole bunch of different people. So those are the two biggest things: body image and just mental health in general.

I often say a happy swimmer is a fast swimmer, which can really be applied to any sport. And so as coaches we need to foster that environment.

Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for a high schooler and middle schooler. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.

Got a question for Coach Steve you want answered in a column? Email him at [email protected]

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