Friday Feature: Tremendous Fight
February 11, 2011 | Women's Swimming & Diving
Feb. 11, 2011
By Scott Weighart, Special to GoTerriers.com
BOSTON - With the America East championship scheduled to begin on Thursday at UMBC, the Boston University men's and women's swimming and diving teams know that they will have a tremendous fight on their hands.
Boston College may be the big archrival for the Terrier ice hockey teams. But when the water is liquid instead of solid, UMBC is the team that the Terriers love to hate. In men's competition, the Retrievers have won an astonishing seven consecutive America East titles. On the women's side, the Terriers have managed to beat out previous champion UMBC for the second year in a row, thanks in part to a personal best performance by diver Bailey O'Brien.
As this championship approaches, however, O'Brien faces a far greater fight against a much tougher rival.
Back in her first year at Boston University, the New York native contracted melanoma, ultimately undergoing four or five surgeries. Showing incredible resolve, O'Brien battled back to peak performance as a junior. "When she went through her treatments after her freshman year, it left her weak," said head coach Bill Smyth. "It left her as physically strong as a 13 or 14-year-old. To watch her go from that point to where she was gaining strength, performance, and momentum--to see her rising in the conference rankings and get to that point by her junior year--it showed tremendous fight athletically, and I'm sure that's carried over to everything she's going through right now."
O'Brien received extremely difficult news just weeks ago. "She has stage IV metastatic melanoma," Smyth said. "She has tumors in her lungs, spine, rib cage, and chin. The oncologist has told her that based on the type of tumors she has, traditional treatment only offers a success rate of about 10%."
So while her teammates prepare for the most pressure-packed competition of the season, O'Brien has set her sights on a trip to Mexico, where she is expected to go to a facility that offers a combination of holistic, alternative, and mainstream treatments.
This jarring news has kept the demands of training and performance in perspective for her teammates. "At the end of the day, it makes you take a step back and realize that this is just a swimming and diving team," said senior swimmer Sarah Doersam. "We're just racing back and forth in the pool. She's got a bigger race, a bigger fight going on."
Senior Kyle Ernst is one of the standouts on the men's swimming team, the holder of school records in the 100- and 200-meter breaststroke. "One of the things that everyone notices is that despite all the things that are happening to her and how horrible it is, she always keeps a really awesome mentality about it," Ernst said. "She's always smiling and laughing, and that goes a long way with the rest of the team--especially in a sport where halfway through the season you're broken down physically and everyone starts to complain. Morale gets really low, but then you look at somebody like Bailey, and you appreciate the time you do have here. I know she's bummed she's not here, but she's still helping us out."
These athletes have definitely had an inspired year since Bailey's melanoma resurfaced in September. "The women had an extremely successful dual meet season," Smyth said. "They've lost one meet in the last two seasons and that was to UMBC, our archrival within the conference. So I think that's good. They have the taste of defeat in their mouths, and they're pretty hungry to go down to Maryland to rectify the earlier loss in the season."
The women's team may have destroyed BC by a whopping 227-72 margin last week, but they lost to UMBC by just 12 points back in October. "Although I don't like losing, it was a really good kick in the butt," Doersam said. "It was a good motivator."
The men have a somewhat similar story, though UMBC is an even more formidable foe for them. While the woman lost by a narrow margin in the fall, the men were beaten decisively. "We went down there midway through the season, and we got smacked pretty hard," Ernst said, referring to the 178-115 defeat. "It was definitely a wake-up call, and in some ways it was helpful because everyone is going to keep that hunger. As a senior, it would be nice to get that back. Every year that I've been here we've gotten second. We're on our way up, but we still have a lot of work to do."
With the team's focus on work ethic--both in the blue-collar sense of getting heart rates and lung capacity up as well as in the more cerebral sense of analyzing strengths and weaknesses--Smyth believes that the Terriers are poised to take away the conference title at long last. "They have a very good chance to do that. We need to be firing on all cylinders, and we need to be in good health. They have to realize that every place matters. We're going to be relying on the strength of our divers. That's been a winning formula for us for some time."
Of course, the women divers are particularly close to Bailey O'Brien. "The biggest thing is that we're diving for each other," senior Sarah Colton said. "Even though Bailey can't be there, we're representing her. So that pushes us harder. I think, `I shouldn't be scared of this dive because Bailey would give anything to be at this meet.' It gives another reason to want to do so well."
"I can imagine that if that happened to me, I would just collapse and cry every day," said sophomore Melinda Matyas, the Hungarian-born star on the diving team. "But she doesn't. She just keeps going. She smiles. She stays positive. She's the strongest person that we all know."
The teammates have fond memories of O'Brien's personal best showing at last year's conference championships. Bailey finished third in the 3M with a score of 443.05 and second in the 1M with a 439.50 point total. "I've never seen her dive so well, even under all of that pressure," Matyas said. "The team needed us to do really well. She was really, really happy after that because she did so well."
"She's a pretty tough person," diving coach Agnes Gerlach-Miller said. "She's so strong mentally. She doesn't give up. She works hard. Last year was her best year ever. All of her hard work really came out, and I'm really, really happy right now that it happened."
"She's amazing," Colton said. "She's really strong, and this has just brought it out even more. When she was diving, she never balked. Balking is when you go down the board to dive but then stop because you're scared. She always would go for it. Always."
Gerlach-Miller offered more insight into why some divers sometimes fall into the bad habit of balking. "A diver who takes an approach and stops is not very confident and is waiting for the perfect approach, the perfect takeoff," the former Hungarian Olympian said. "But that doesn't exist. So I have to teach them that it doesn't exist. You have to take what you get and do the best you can with what you've got."
Bailey O'Brien is living that philosophy every day right now, showing the same tremendous fight that she has always showed on the springboard. While she prepares to go to Mexico, the team is printing up t-shirts with the word "relentless" on them--a nod to melanoma awareness and a tribute to their teammate.
"We want Bailey back as soon as possible," Smyth said. "We want her on the team; we want her in school; we want her on the pool deck. Anything we can do to get her back here, the sooner the better. The highlight of my day is when I see Bailey on the pool deck."
Meanwhile, Bailey supports her teammates with frequent letters and emails that have struck a chord with their honesty and eloquence. Simultaneously, the team is doing what it can to "support her in every way possible: emotionally, spiritually, and fiscally," according to Smyth.
To that end, the team has promoted awareness of Bailey's plight in the BU athletic department as well as in the swimming community and in Terrier nation at large. Bailey's treatments in Mexico are expensive, and they are not covered by health insurance. The program is determined to be relentless in its efforts to help out the family during this challenging time.
Although she's currently on dry land, here's hoping that Bailey is poised to redefine her personal best. With the support of her teammates, she aims to blow cancer out of the water.
Would you like to support Bailey O'Brien and her family through her medical crisis? Make a check out to Boston University, and be sure to write "Bailey O'Brien Fund" in the memo line of your check. Send your gift to:
Boston University Gifts and Records
595 Commonwealth Avenue, Suite 700, West Entrance
Boston, MA 02215
