By Hannah Hickman
As my time at Ouachita Baptist University comes to a close, I have been asked to reflect on the lessons I have learned while here. I gave a lot of consideration to all the things I have learned during college, but the ones that stood out were the lessons I learned from being a Ouachita Baptist Tigershark.
Say yes to trying new things
I still remember the last day of freshman orientation, when a speaker encouraged us to say yes to trying new things.
I did not think I was going to come to Ouachita. When the topic of colleges came up while I was in high school, I was adamantly against leaving the only place I had ever lived. I loved my comfort zone and I saw no reason to change that. Sure, swimming might be cool, but there was no way I would ever move four hours away from my hometown to a school in the middle of nowhere where I knew absolutely no one. I had been homeschooled my entire life and had barely even spent the night somewhere else. Fast-forward to senior year, and my coach at the time dragged me along on a recruiting trip to visit Ouachita and connect with the swim team. I was not excited. I probably said 4 sentences the whole time because I was so nervous to meet strangers. When I met the swim team, some of the current swimmers sat with the recruits in the student center and just talked with us. That was the first time I was truly able to see myself at OBU. I did not want to accept it, but I finally started to strongly consider coming to school and swimming for Ouachita. I had been weighing my decision for weeks, when my boss said to me,
“You shouldn’t not do things just because you’re scared.”
While it sounds like very simple and obvious advice, that statement has helped me reframe many decisions in my life. There are lots of reasons to not do something, but if they can be boiled down to the real only reason being that I am scared, the answer should always be yes. Coming to swim at OBU and leaving the only place I had ever known was one of the scariest things I had ever done, but I said yes to it, and I am so glad that I did. Saying yes to trying new things that you are scared of allows you to expand your horizons beyond the tiny bubble of the world that you thought you knew.
Mental toughness
The second lesson I have learned throughout my college career that immediately came to mind is the concept of mental toughness, an idea that my swim coach has always really emphasized on our team.
My swimming background was not that of most of my teammates who were used to doing two practices a day in a club environment and competing at a high level. I had only ever swum on a recreational league swim team from age 7 to 18. College swimming was an entirely different beast. Physically and mentally, college swimming is grueling. I rolled out of bed to my alarm blaring at 5:15 am in the morning and forced myself to go jump in a pool where I froze to my core. Swam, lifted or did drylands, hopefully ate breakfast and rushed through a shower if I had time, and rolled into class with wet hair, dry skin, and eyes that could barely stay open through my classes. Ate lunch, crammed in some homework, set a timer for a ten-minute nap between class and practice because I physically could not stay awake but I didn’t have time to sleep any longer, and then went to afternoon practice for another grueling 2+ hours in the pool. Then dinner, study hall, and nonstop homework until I couldn’t stay awake anymore, and I would crash until my alarm went off again for morning practice. It was an endless cycle. The schedule was demanding, but the practices were even more so. I had never worked out so hard in my life. I died from the moment I started warm-up to when we were cooling down. For at least the first 3 months, I cried through probably 8 out of the 10 practices a week.
On my first travel meet, we rode the bus for 12 hours to Odessa, Texas, where we swam in an outdoor pool in 46-degree weather. I could not feel anything lower than my knees when I was walking to my races, and when I dove in, it was like I was a block of ice, moving in slow motion because I was so stiff from the cold. The best part was that it was a two-day meet, so we got to come back the next day when it was even colder and do it all over again. It was horrible. Truly awful.
The miserable conditions, however, were never an excuse for my coach. Just like in practice, he expected us to be mentally tough.
Through my entire college swimming career, I have had to find my mental toughness. There were so many days where I thought I could not do it, or I didn’t feel good, or the conditions were terrible. My coach never let us use the circumstances as an excuse. Money, facilities, equipment, and natural talent didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if you were cold, tired, or didn’t feel good in the water. Everyone else was tired too. Mental toughness was what differentiated you. Swimming in college is the hardest thing I have ever done, but it is also one of my proudest accomplishments because I was able to push through every hard day and embrace the pain. I can confidently say that I am much more mentally tough today because of college swimming, and I know that I am capable of doing other hard things too.
Extreme ownership
Another value my coach instilled in us was the expectation for us to take extreme ownership. Ultimately, we were the ones who controlled our destiny. If we didn’t take the extra effort at practice to do hard things, then we would not swim well at the end of the season. Extreme ownership, simply put, is taking absolute responsibility of all the factors that impact your mission. The amount of effort and focus I put into every single length of the pool, my attitude, my sleep schedule, my eating habits, staying on top of schoolwork and grades, and maintaining social relationships all ultimately ended with me. One of the main points of this concept was avoiding playing the blame game and making excuses. This idea translates to all other areas of life.
A professor of mine once said that there are two types of people in the world: Problem creators and problem solvers. Problem creators are people who find a problem and bring that complaint or issue to someone else to solve. Problem solvers are those people who approach a problem and take the initiative to find a solution rather than bringing it as a complaint. The buck stops with them. I want to be a problem-solver. That includes taking extreme ownership for every aspect of my mission.
Do things because you love to
Swimming is a love-hate relationship. There were definitely A LOT of days when I woke up and would have literally rather done anything else than drag myself from my warm bed to go jump in a freezing cold pool. I was also definitely not a big point-scorer. There is no instant gratification in swimming. At the end of the day, however, I stuck with it because swimming in college was truly what I wanted to be doing. I always found my motivation re-kindled when we would go train in Florida in an outdoor pool for a week over winter break, and I would remember how it felt to be an 8-year-old swimming outside on my summer league team. I was reminded of this feeling again at my final conference meet when I saw my reflection in the window behind the blocks for my last race and thought about how proud 8-year-old me would be of the fact that I was a college swimmer. When it came down to it, my motivation to swim was intrinsic, because swimming was truly what I wanted to be doing. This taught me to examine your true reason for doing things, and to do things because you love to and not because of external motivation.
Being part of a team
As cliché as it sounds, the absolute best part about swimming in college was being part of a team. There is no support system with the bond that a college swim team has. There was always someone ready to give me a high five after a race or a hard set. I always had someone encouraging me when practice or classes got hard. I knew I would always have people to sit with in the caf. I always had study buddies in classes. Someone was always ready to go to the lake, make a late-night Walmart run, slide down the stairs on mattresses, or just hang out. The best memories from my college experience are all with my teammates.
So, if you are swimming in college: I know that it absolutely, totally, and completely sucks a lot of the time. It is hard and it is grueling, and you will wake up wanting to jump off a cliff instead of jump into the pool. It takes your blood, sweat, and tears for little to no reward at the end of the season. But I encourage you to embrace this time and the memories you will make, because it truly will be over before you know it. I look back on this time with fondness already. I am thankful for every practice that I commiserated through with my teammates, the meets full of scream-cheering and high-fives, winter break trainings when we only had each other hang out with, all the meals at “our” tables in the cafeteria, and even the bus rides that turned into hours spent sitting in a gas station parking lot when the bus broke down.
Say yes to trying new things, be mentally tough, take extreme ownership, do things because you love to, and enjoy every moment you have being part of a team.
Thanks to my teammates and my coaches for giving me the best experience.
Hannah Hickman 