Guilty Admissions by Nicole LaPorte

Author:Nicole LaPorte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: None
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2020-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

In a photograph of the Springfield College women’s swim team, taken in 1983, Donna Heinel is in the back row on the far end. The only swimmer who is not wearing one of those glossy, satiny team jackets from the era of all things glossy and satiny, Heinel is wearing just her team swimsuit. She’s also the only member of the team not looking into the camera and smiling. Instead, she’s staring off into the distance with a blank look.

The photograph was taken Heinel’s senior year at Springfield, where she’d been an All-American swimmer and a standout in freestyle and the one-hundred-meter individual medley. “She was one of the best swimmers, if not the best, at Springfield College,” said Mary Ellen Olcese, the head women’s swim coach at Springfield, a Division III school, when Heinel was there. “As an athlete, she was a really hard worker. She was a main stalwart of the team.”

But out of the pool, Olcese said, she kept a distance from her peers. “She was not a warm, fuzzy person. She was not the person everyone clung to. She was a good teammate, but she took to herself.”

John Bransfield, who coached diving at Springfield then, said, “Donna was a very independent human being. She was extremely dynamic. She walked her own walk.”

Heinel has admitted to having her own struggles growing up, telling an LGBTQ panel in 2013 that when she came out as gay to her parents, she didn’t have a relationship with her family for two and a half years. As a result, she said, “I’ve been a loner for most of my life. Because from early on, and that reaction from my parents. I’ve just been someone that just, I do what I want to do when I want to do it.”

After graduating from Springfield with a degree in physical education, Heinel pursued coaching, volunteering first for Olcese at Springfield and then landing a job at the University of Massachusetts as the women’s water polo head coach and assistant coach for women’s swimming. In 2003, she switched gears into sports administration and arrived at USC, where she started as an assistant athletic coordinator.

Tall and wiry, with short-cropped blond hair and a thin, chiseled face, Heinel arrived at the office every morning at seven and kept her nose to the grindstone. She was someone who got the job done efficiently and without complaint or drama. “She was a pretty hard worker, pretty serious and in a rush,” said Myron Dembo, who was Donna Heinel’s academic supervisor when she completed her doctor of education degree at USC in 2006. “She didn’t have time to schmooze.” Indeed, Heinel was intensely private, never sharing information about her personal life with colleagues—she lived with her partner and their two children—in part because she didn’t feel the atmosphere at USC was very gay-friendly. At the time, most gay student athletes at USC didn’t come out to their teammates, and the general attitude within the athletic department was don’t ask, don’t tell.

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