Chapter Two - Drive

"Whatever tomorrow brings, I'll be there with open arms and open eyes."

- Incubus "Drive

During the car ride home, Addie weighed the options in her mind. The practice schedule for Penny’s team was time consuming and needed full focus and dedication. Doubles three days a week, a three hour practice on Saturdays full of pool time and drylands, then factor in meets every Saturday from the end of September to the end of February. That left time for homework and little else free time, let alone to be part of another sports team. She’d have to choose.


Her bedroom was not one that you would expect from a star athlete. There were no trophies on her dresser, no medals hung from racks, no ribbons littered on a shelf. Track jerseys and swimsuits were no where to be found, except for on the dozens of pictures which hung from black frames on the four painted walls. Addie and her best friend Megan in front of Lejeune Hall at the Naval Academy after the State Championships. Both of the girls were holding their Speedo leg suits over their head in victory poses, happy to be done with their club swimming careers. Another picture of Addie, her older brother Tommy and her parents, all four decked out in full Severna River paraphernalia after a meet her Junior year. Addie in the evergreen and white track jersey, with her dark brown hair hanging in her face and a small black brace around her left knee. The same left knee she had the ACL surgery on just five months earlier, nearly half the amount of recovery time usually needed.


Addie took both pictures down from their positions next to her bed and looked at both. The memories of both came flowing back into her consciousness and she felt the tears come to her eyes. She didn’t know how she would choose between the two sports, as they both brought something special and different to her life. You could say that running was her first love. Never all that great at anything that required outstanding hand-to-eye coordination, she always was the leader of the gym class in the warm up laps around the field. Add a soccer ball to her feet, she would stumble. Hand her a football, it would most likely connect with the receiver’s head. Tell her to run two miles, she would leave her classmates in her dust. Hurdles were a challenge at first, but once she got into the rhythm of them, she excelled at that as well. Running was her outlet, it helped her release stress and her thoughts. Going for a quick mile run before she began her homework throughout middle school allowed her to focus better on her reading or math problems.


Swimming was a different story. Her parents dipped her in the baby pool at the local YMCA when she was four and enrolled her in swim lessons when she was six. Tommy had taken to the water right away, he always eager to go to lessons and when he got older, team practice, but Addie was the complete opposite. She cried the first time her mom dropped her off with the swim instructor with her ratty towel and pink goggles in hand. She barely made it through her first swim race without drowning because she was choking on her sobs. Every summer, Addie and Tommy would join the other community kids on the swim team, sucking on lemons and candy canes between races and playing hide and seek when they should have been lining up for their heats. But swimming was never something that Addie considered a passion. When Tommy, joined the competitive year-round club swim team during his freshman year of high school, he became fast friends with Michael. Michael, who was a year older than Tommy, was considered the fastest boy in Maryland. Tall, lean and muscular, he was already being scouted by some of the best colleges in the nation as the top recruit and a potential Olympian. Addie became infatuated with him the minute Tommy had invited Michael over to play video games.


Yes, Addie joined the swim team in order to see Michael more. Is she proud of the fact that she got involved in something for such a shallow reason? No. Did Michael in a speedo make her quickly forget her guilt? Yes.


It turned out that once Addie dedicated more than just a few months in the summer to swimming, that she had some genuine natural talent. She dropped seconds nearly every time she raced in a meet in any stroke or distance, something that more seasoned swimmers were not accustomed to. After only six months, she had been moved up to the top group within the club which consisted of the most advanced swimmers, including her brother and Michael. The two siblings had never competed against each other and had for the most part gotten along throughout their childhood. Now, with thirteen year old Addie the quickly rising star throughout the club and fifteen year old Tommy struggling to keep up, swim practice became a challenge for coaches.


It didn’t take long for the club coaches to see that Tommy and Addie had developed a sort of sibling rivalry. Addie swam in the lane with the three other girls on the team and would edge her way to be leader of the lane in order to race against Tommy in the next lane over. Tommy would attempt to leave a second early on beep sprints because he didn’t want to be beaten by his little sister. She in turn would scream and holler every time Tommy’s hand left the wall ahead of the beep which would just cause her to leave even later. Being on the swim team together had brought them closer as they bonded over injuries, missed championship cuts and bad practices, but the competitiveness that developed would be engrained in both of them for the future.


Swimming and the team camaraderie that she was something that she felt was missing from her high school life of track and field. It allowed her to both release aggression and have fun. She knew that she wanted the challenge of helping Mark Penny exceed the expectations placed on his team. She wanted to be a Lady Tiger on the Towson Swimming and Diving team.