As freshman Shoshana Hallissey lined up to complete her leg of a relay in the final event of her swim meet last summer, she felt nervous. Only the fastest swimmers of each team compete in the final relay during meets with her summer swim team, and the pressure was on. Before leaping off the wall, she started to hear people cheering, and when she turned to look, she saw her whole team chanting her name.

“There’s a lot of times like that when the whole team really comes together to cheer on and support someone… and I love that,” Hallissey said.

Hallissey, who has been competing since she was 7 years old, joined her first summer swim team, Northwest Branch in June 2018. After her first race, she decided she wanted to continue her journey, and has competed on her summer team and year-round team, Tollefson Swimming, every year since. Hallissey is also a co-captain of the CESJDS swim team.

Hallissey spends much of her time swimming, having local meets every month. Larger regional meets also take place every three to four months in Maryland, Virginia, Florida and even farther. In particular, she has honed her butterfly and freestyle strokes. Hallissey has practice four times a week and she is often awake as early as 4 a.m. in order to get in as much practice time as possible before school with her year-round team.

“In terms of balancing a lot of school work and other activities and clubs, swimming practices, training and meets take up a lot of time,” Hallissey said. “So there’s a really big challenge of how to balance all of my activities.”

According to her mother, Marni Hall, the time is spent wisely. Hall, who swam on her summer camp’s swim team growing up, views competitive swimming as valuable both in the short and long term because of the commitment and organizational skills that it teaches swimmers, and the exercise that can continue lifelong.

“Swim is an excellent way to exercise and stay in shape for your life, [it’s] a great mind-body exercise,” Hall said. “…and then there’s some of the commitment and organization and hard work that I think transfers to a lot of other things she does.”

“You learn so much about consistency, work ethic and time management, things that are going to carry over, not just in an athletic career, but in an academic career and in life,” Fisher said. “Swimming’s a sport where you get results from how much hard work you put into it.”

As Hallissey grew older, she began to diversify her hobbies, taking up the viola, performing Shakespeare and joining debate. Thus, she found that she was no longer the fastest swimmer on her team. However, Hallissey, who is still unsure of how “intensely” she’ll take swimming in the future, believes that it will always be a part of her life, through college and beyond. 

“I feel so much better when I’m swimming consistently,” Hallissey said. “I feel very satisfied and proud of myself, because it also teaches me things like discipline and hard work and [their] rewards, and it makes me really, really happy.”