Keep Climbing by Sean Swarner & Rusty Fischer

Author:Sean Swarner & Rusty Fischer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2007-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

The $100,000 Party

All during my senior year of high school, like most kids (God, how I loved being like most kids), I was applying to a number of different colleges and universities, all with swim teams and track teams. To keep my options open, I looked at a number of small schools as well as large ones. Dad drove me around on my few free weekends from swimming, track, and my burgeoning social life to visit the schools, meet the coaches, see the students, the campuses, and the admissions folks. When the whole admissions process was all said and done, I had applied to seven schools and was accepted into every one of them. Pretty good, if I do say so myself.

After visiting the schools, I decided on one about two and a half hours away from home (sometimes I think I made it home in about an hour and forty-five minutes). It was finally official: Westminster College was going to be my home for the next four years. I saw this as more than a new leg of my educational journey. If you think about it (and you can bet I did), this was an incredible way for me to start over.

Not a single person there knew who I was, what I had been through, where I’d come from, or anything. There was none of the baggage that had followed me through the halls of junior high or high school. No one would be seeing the new Sean or the old Sean or the thin Sean or the fat Sean or the wig Sean or the sick Sean; they would simply be seeing Sean.

I was starting with a clean slate and could write my own future. I was excited to get going and start my new life with my new roommate, but I was a little hesitant at first. He was from Hoboken, New Jersey, about a twenty-minute ferry ride from Manhattan. Great. I was going to be living with some big-city slicker. Here I was, from a town of about five thousand people, and he was leaving his home of over a million. Through phone calls and letters (we didn’t have the Internet yet), I found that he seemed like a nice enough guy, and after getting used to the idea, I wasn’t as worried about it. Turned out Brendan and I were roommates throughout our entire college career and, better yet, became best friends in the process.

Freshman year was fantastic, but little did I know Mom and Dad had talked to the swim coach, as well as Brendan, because they were worried about me. I found out much later that they had approached both of them and told them my medical history. Sneaky as can be, yes. Was I upset about it when I found out? Oh, you bet! But when the dust cleared and my temper tantrum blew over, I could see why it made sense to them. After all, they weren’t sure I was going to make it through college alive.

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