The Silencing of a Swimmer

By Bryan Olmstead

This is a true story of a young girl who decides to try competitive swimming. In a short time she becomes one of her team's best swimmers. However, when she outshines the coach's daughter, the trouble begins. You will not believe the lengths that the coach and his allies go to push the young girl out of swim. The swimming organization would not even allow the young girl to tell her side of the story. Silence was all they wanted from her. Her family went through great effort to help the young girl fight. Although she was never allowed her voice, this book is her voice. This book is also a cry for help for her younger sister who is now being attacked.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098346775

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The Silencing of a Swimmer

© 2020 by Bryan Olmstead

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 978-1-09834-676-8 eBook 978-1-09834-677-5

Contents

Chapter 1: Motivation

Chapter 2: Coach Wade

Chapter 3: The Board

Chapter 4: The Three Adult Attack

Charter 5: Alternatives

Chapter 6: State Games

Chapter 7: Sister

Chapter 8: The Star Showed Up

Chapter 9: Coaching

Chapter 10: BEST

Chapter 11: The Jonty Effect

Chapter 12: Abuse of Power 101

Chapter 13: Back to the pool

Chapter 14: Top 5

Chapter 15: The Systemic Lie

Chapter 16: The So-called War.

Chapter 17: LSA

Chapter 18: Coaching at Home

Chapter 19: Other Antics

Chapter 20: The Attacks Continue

Chapter 21: Offense is the Best Defense

Chapter 22: Try to Join Makos

Chapter 23: Stepped Up to Do Right.

Chapter 24: The Lawsuit

Chapter 25: Break the Record

Chapter 26: Sucker Punch

Chapter 27: All Alone

Chapter 28: Warren Holladay’s True Colors

Chapter 29: The Changing Tide

Chapter 30: Final Swim

Chapter 31: Targeting Innocent Maya

Preface

I am publishing this book not because of Marina’s story, which is a story of overcoming bullying by Mississippi Swimming to become the undisputed champion of Mississippi, but rather because of the on-going bullying of our younger daughter Maya. In the case of Maya, this is a cry for help.

I am not a writer. I am a father who did his best to protect his daughter. I wrote this book to give my daughter Marina a voice: a voice she was denied by USA Swimming and Mississippi Swimming for six years.

I have done everything in my power to make sure everything I have written here is true and factual.

All too often, people in power think that their position exists to give them privilege. This thinking creates corrupt, ineffective leaders who always do more damage than good.

A good leader, a leader for the ages, knows that his abilities are gifts from God. They know that they have a responsibility to use those abilities not for privilege but for sacrifice to the benefit of everyone.

If you are not willing to do this, you should not aspire to be a leader, which would also be for the benefit of everyone.

The first step in keeping children safe should always be to listen to the child. Not to do so is dangerously irresponsible.

USA Swimming competitions produce and preserve an abundance of detailed data that is available to the public. There are also a number of news articles published during the time Marina swam. It is not possible to tell Marina’s story and shield the identities of the other competition participants. It is important to defend their innocence. Guileless young swimmers were manipulated and used for harm. They did not deserve that! Young swimmers deserve better; they deserve to be heard and protected.

Chapter 1:

Motivation

A well-known swim coach once said to me, You have done so much for your daughter so she can swim.

I said, I don’t care anything about swim; all I care about is what swim can do for my daughter.

Marina’s motivation for swim began years before she became involved with swim.

Now, what follows is not meant to disrespect beauty pageants. It’s just how I felt about my daughter participating in one.

Around the time Marina was five or six years old, my wife, Anthia, wanted Marina to be in a beauty contest. I did not agree, and when my wife asked why, I told her, Beauty contests are club-minded. The most beautiful child doesn’t always win. Politics, popularity, and cliques play a huge role in deciding the winner. This is unavoidable, since beauty is not an absolute but in the eyes of the beholder.

Marina has always been very sensitive. The world is a very cruel place for a gentle soul. I didn’t want her to be hurt. Also, I believe that when it comes to my daughter’s beauty, the only opinion in the world that matters is mine. No one on this planet should be able to say otherwise.

My wife discounted my wishes on this, thinking I was overreacting and that the pageant was just good clean fun.

Marina looked more beautiful than I had ever seen her. No makeup, no glitter; just her own simple, beautiful innocence. But she didn’t win any award. It was like watching her soul leave her body. She was crushed, and I was helpless to stop it. Her self-confidence was gone, and every time I told her she was beautiful, I could tell she thought I was lying.

In the following months, she began to gain weight and pull out her eyebrows. She was still a very good student. Though I am athletic, at this point I didn’t believe Marina would be. I was willing to accept the fact that Marina would be a slightly overweight, straight A student, and maybe go to MIT like her mother.

The real problem came as I watched her interact with other children. Due to her lack of self-esteem, she was not popular and had very few friends. Once, when I came to pick her up after a birthday party, she was sitting outside the house. The other children had locked her out and were making fun of her. I cannot express the depth of the hurt and anger I felt. All I wanted in this world was for God to give me some way to fix this.

We have a pool in our backyard. It is a standard 18x36 in-ground pool. That is where Marina learned to swim. It didn’t come naturally; she showed no love of the water. She took interest in a few after-school activities, but she had no passion for any of them as well.

She was 11 years old when she said she’d like to try competitive swim. I said to her, Swim is really hard. Are you sure you want to do that?

She said, Yes. She had some friends who swam, so she wanted to try. I was glad she was interested in an activity.

The relative swim organizations are as follows: USA Swimming is the national governing body for all local swim clubs. Mississippi Swimming is the state organization associated with USA Swimming. Meridian Swim Association (MSA) is a local swim club that is subject to Mississippi Swimming and USA Swimming.

We took Marina to the Meridian Swim Association (MSA) swim club in Meridian, Mississippi, to try out.

Coach Wade Heggie was the head coach of MSA which used the pool at Meridian Community College (MCC). Coach Wade’s mother was the Dean of Community Affairs at MCC, and she helped Wade get his job as the fitness center director at MCC. He married one of his MCC students and has two children, his daughter Megan and a son.

Coach Wade Heggie said Marina needed be able to swim across the pool to join. She managed with great effort to swim across the pool and made it. She was allowed to joined the team.

She wasn’t very good, but she participated in the practices. About a month or so into the season, MSA announced there would be a local swim meet.

Already, Marina wanted to quit. She said she could not even do the warm-up drills. Crying, she begged me to let her quit. I was caving, mainly because I didn’t see an athletic future for her, but her mother said no. We had paid for it; she had to finish what we paid for. This meant Marina would have to swim at the meet.

MSA’s meets are known for attracting slower swimmers. Marina’s first competition was like everything else in her life at that time; her lack of confidence nearly ensured she would come in last. She almost did, but in one race, she finished second to last. She was so excited. For the first time ever, she didn’t feel like a total loser.

The public acknowledgement mattered to her, and that got my attention. God was giving me a chance to help my daughter. Swim could be the answer to giving Marina self-confidence. From that day on, she went from practicing two days a week to practicing three days a week.

Chapter 2:

Coach Wade

At MSA, Marina’s coach was Coach Sam, a former college swimmer. All seemed to go well, and Marina began to improve.

I almost never went to her practices at first. If I did, I almost always dozed off. For the few minutes I was awake, it was more than obvious that this swim club was as cliquish as the pageant had been years ago; but in swim, there is a clock, not a judge. It was clear to me that the small size of the team and its lack of success was clique-related. Cliques are notorious for being unfair to their lessor members and pushing outsiders to keep them away.

The problems began when Marina started becoming a threat to the star swimmer at MSA, Megan Heggie—Coach Wade Heggie’s daughter. Two years younger than Marina, Megan was in a different age-group swim. (Swim is broken up into age groups: 10 years old and under, 11-12 years, 13-14, 15-16, 17-18, and seniors.) The problem was that Marina was improving much faster than Megan. Marina’s improvement was being noticed.

Unfortunately, Coach Sam moved away from the Meridian area, and in August 2013, Coach Wade began coaching Marina.

Soon after Coach Wade began coaching her, Marina’s demeanor changed. She wanted to skip swim practices, and the love she was building for swim came to a stop.

So, I started attending her practices and stayed awake. To me it seemed like Coach Wade was showing patterns of being unfair to Marina, and I wasn’t sure if Marina was the only target. He would put her in lanes with much slower swimmers, which made her practices useless. Maybe he was just unaware of how much she had improved.

I talked with Wade several times and tried to do the buddy thing. He told me stories of the state championships he won in the breaststroke and about his college swimming. (At that time, I had no idea he was lying about all of this. He never won a state championship, as the Meridian Swim Association website says. The college he went to shut down their swim program years before Heggie got there.)

I asked him all kinds of stuff like, What does Marina need to work on? Have you noticed any improvement? I told him we had a pool at home and asked if she could work on swim at home.

He said, No. Our conversation went on for another 20 minutes, mostly focused on what a good coach Wade thought he was.

Below is a scan from MSA’s website, retrieved 01/28/2019, which publishes his claim of multiple state championships.

During Wade’s swim years, the breaststroke champions were swimmers like Brian Ware, who was a bit older; Michael Russ, who was the same age group as Wade; and Davis Paden. These swimmers set the state records and won all the gold medals in breaststroke. I have spoken to numerous swimmers from Wade’s days of swim. Only a few remember him, and those who do say he was not fast at all. I spoke to one woman whose daughter swam with Wade back then. When I asked her about Wade’s championships in breaststroke, she replied, Breaststroke? She laughed and continued, Wade’s sister was faster than Wade in the breaststroke.

At one swim meet, someone mentioned how poorly Mississippi swimmers performed their underwater swimming. "Underwater" is when a swimmer pushes or springs from the wall until the swimmer breaks the surface of the water and starts their swim stroke. Marina was no exception. I thought, this was one thing we could work on at home in our own pool. In October of 2013, we practiced the underwater dolphin kick over and over again. Marina took to it quickly, and in no time became one of the best underwater swimmers in the state.

Coach Wade asked Marina what she was doing and why she was working on her streamline (the underwater technique), as if she was doing something wrong. It was a strange thing to ask since underwater swimming is such an important technique. Plus, she was now making qualifying times for Mississippi Swimming State championship meets. She almost reached an A time at a meet in Birmingham, Alabama. (Every few years, USA Swimming publishes a chart of motivational times, or cuts. Every age group gets a set of time standards to meet, ranging from B, the slowest times, to AAAA.) Time cuts are the most important thing to a young swimmer, and Marina began cutting time like crazy.

In early 2014, the kids were getting ready for a meet in Tupelo, and Coach Wade Heggie told me to make sure Marina shaved her legs before the meet. This was a standard for swim, and I told him she would. Then he asked me how high Marina shaved her legs. This question is inappropriate because the competition suits used at these meets at the time came down to the knee. How high swimmers shave their legs is not useful information. All the coaches I had spoken to, including representatives at USA Swimming, agreed the question was inappropriate.

Now, I have done some coaching, and I know sometimes one might ask a question without thinking about how it might sound. I figured that was the case for this question. I did not respond, thinking he would realize the question was inappropriate. He then repeated the question. How high does Marina shave her legs?

I replied, I don’t think that question is appropriate.

I thought he would say, Oh, I didn’t think how that sounded. Sorry. That was not his reaction. He was angered. From my experience as a coach, his reaction was unsettling. I got the feeling this wasn’t the first time he had asked this question about a swimmer.

I spoke with my wife about that incident. There had been a local softball coach that had recently been arrested for sexual misconduct with numerous minors over decades. We were naturally cautious, and we decided Marina should not be alone with Coach Wade in the future, just to be safe. Coach Wade never asked any more inappropriate questions.

At the meet, Marina won her first race ever, in the Girls 11-12 100-yard Backstroke. One would think that this would be a celebrated event. Nope. Coach Wade pulled Marina aside. I tried to get closer to hear what he said, but was unsuccessful. Marina later told me he said she should have saved her energy for the 50-yard Freestyle so she could get her A time.

Just for the record, no good coach would ever say something that stupid!

At every meet at this age, you want the child to make best times in all races. Saying that a child should not win their first race ever so she can make an A time in the 50-yard Freestyle is simply stupid. When a child wins a race, they get all pumped