Just imagine this: you are a collegiate swimmer, working hard to make it to the national invitational. You finally hit that time where you are going to the national meet to represent your school, your team, your family and so on. This is one of the greatest accomplishments of your life.
Now, let us get a little specific. You are still that same swimmer, but you are a Div. III swimmer, where the national meet is held in Greensboro, North Carolina. Better yet, you are part of a SUNY school, where the travel to North Carolina is considered “state sanctioned.”
The NCAA originally posed the same kind of ban but lifted it shortly after North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory put the bill into place.
Due to the circumstances, you cannot stay in North Carolina. You find a hotel in Roanoke, Virginia, and have to travel farther to the swim meet every day. This harsh reality is true for a dozen swimmers and divers from SUNY Geneseo, SUNY Cortland and The College at Brockport.
When North Carolina passed the Bathroom Bill, which required transgender people to use the bathroom of their gender assigned at birth, New York state Gov. Andrew Cuomo posed a travel ban for all state-sponsored travel to North Carolina in response to the bill.
This entire situation messes up those student-athletes not only on the physical side of swimming but also the psychological side. While swimming is already demanding on the bodies of swimmers and divers, with sometimes two practices per day, lifting sessions and not a lot of time for recovery, there is now the mental side of everything with the sport.
Take a 50-yard freestyle swimmer, for example. Those swimmers practice hours a day, all for a sub-30-second event, at least at nationals. They also require a lot of rest to prepare for such a high-intensity event. When you grow up as a swimmer, most coaches will say only take three breaths on the way down and two breaths on the way back. As swimmers get faster, fewer and fewer breaths are taken.
Every minute of rest matters for those swimmers. To ask them to get up an hour and a half earlier than normal just to get on a bus to then go to Greensboro for their 30-second event is unfair to those athletes who work so hard and have, stereotypically, nothing to show for it.
Cuomo needs to lift this ban for future instances that require state-sponsored travel to North Carolina. While it is too late for these swimmers and divers to have the luxury of only being five or 10 minutes away from the arena, future nationals swimmers should not have to suffer as well.
Photo by Maria Pericozzi | The Oswegonian
