Echo Times

Issue date: 3/15/10 Section: Sports

Media Credit: Yukie Sano Recovery lap: After battling drug and alcohol addictions last year, COM swimmer Aaron Waters worked to get a grip on his life. Now he's contending for a spot at the state championship meet.

Media Credit: Yukie Sano Top swimmer Aaron Waters rests during a College of Marin practice at IVC.

Swimmer Aaron Waters pulled himself out of the Indian Valley Campus pool last Saturday during a balmy afternoon swim meet. An outstretched arm had just won him the 100-yard intermediate medley by four hundredths of a second, and the 19-year-old looked at COM's coach, Warren Lager, to check his time. It was a good one: 58.53 seconds for four lengths of the pool.
"You're going to go faster than you did senior year of high school," Lager said. "There's no doubt about it."
Waters smiled, giving a low fist pump as he walked away.
Over the last several months, COM's best swimmer says he has tried to improve many things about his life-both in and out of the pool-following a battle with drug and alcohol addiction that disrupted his senior year at Sir Francis Drake High School.
After missing his graduation day to join a rehabilitation program, entering a detoxification center because of a relapse and then transferring to a sober living community, Waters said his friends and family helped him recognize that going directly to a four-year college, as he originally planned, would hurt his recovery.
With important help from Lager, who coached Waters for the Marin Pirates swimming club team, the young swimmer deferred from Whitier College in Sothern California, while managing to keep his partial scholarship.
He also decided to continue swimming by joining COM's team. After doing very little for nearly half a year, Waters said he realized, "If I didn't get back into (swimming) now, it wasn't going to happen."
The troubles of the past gave Waters a new appreciation for the sport, and moreover, he said, the return to the pool pushed him in a better direction.
"It's the first time I've been deeply motivated to do something positive for myself," he said. "I'm (still) swimming-I'm just doing it differently. I didn't really put the time in before."
An additional payoff from this new dedication could be a trip to the community college state championship, most likely in the 100-yard backstroke, as both Waters and Lager say the first-year COM student has an outside chance of making the big meet. Only 16 swimmers in the state qualify for an event, however. Water's career best time for the 100 is over 55 seconds and Lager believes he will need to drop two seconds from that. His best time this year is 58.53.
Still, after his win in the 400 IM and a convincing victory in Saturday's 100-yard backstroke, COM's coach believes the feat just might be reachable.
Each meet he's swimming faster than before," Lager said. "It's gonna be really close, but he's definitely helped his cause."
Right now, however, Waters is more focused on something else. "My goal is just that our team does well at the Bay Valley Conference Championship," he said.
For COM's six-man and nine-woman teams, that means taking something away from swimming they can use in their everyday life, as well as improving upon individual best times, according to Larger.
On that account, Waters' teammate and fellow Drake alum Max Simpson thinks the teams are already headed for success.
"Things are going pretty well," Simpson said. "It seems like everyone is making improvements."
Lager's third goal may prove more challenging: he'd like to see the men's team finish fourth, and the women's team place fourth or third. For the men, Waters, Simpson and their teammates will need extraordinary efforts to meet that mark, as the team's top swimmer from last year, Martin Malasky, transferred to the University of California Berkeley. He finished second in two events at the 2009 state championship meet.
A lack of experience on the more numerous women's team will also pose difficulties, but a team-first mentality on both squads has Lager believing his targets are in the realm of possibility.
"This group has that mindset and it's really enjoyable to coach when a team's like that," he said. "What was especially encouraging (at the Saturday meet) was that people were branching out into different races."
The more events a team undertakes-particularly the longer, less popular ones-the greater its chance of scoring and achieving a better finish on the score board, he said.
COM's teams will discover more about their progress at the Solano Invitational in Fairfield on March 27, while Waters will put a little more distance between himself and 2009, aiming to shave off a few ticks from his swimming times in the process.

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