Friday, September 3, 2021
My Why: Presley Baber & Mike Lewis
Presley Baber (left) and Mike Lewis (right). Baber photo is courtesy of Riley Baber.
The obligatory groans at early-morning practices? The swimmer hair? The communal joy of a dropped tenth? That’s swimming.
The full spectrum of feels — elation, heartache, accomplishment, disappointment, belonging? That’s swimming.
"My Why" is a series of candid testimonials shared by individuals who believe in the power of swimming. Because everyone — athlete, coach, official, family member — has a story.
Presley Baber | Kansas City Blazers national team swimmer (16) | Overland Park, Kan.
My love for swimming began early, around age four or five. At the neighborhood pool, all I would do is swim laps back and forth. However, I also loved soccer and basketball, so my competitive swimming journey didn’t begin until I was 10.
After I developed knee pain for about a year, I found out I had osteochondritis dissecans and was told I needed surgery. My doctor told me that I was not able to run for a year and the only sport I could participate in was swimming. So, a few weeks after I had my knee surgery in December 2014, I started swimming with the Blazers. It started solely as physical therapy, but after that year when I couldn’t run, I fell in love with the sport of swimming.
I continued playing soccer while swimming with the Blazers from 2016-2018. Finally, in 2018 at a meet in Columbia [Mo.], I realized all I wanted to do was keep swimming. After that meet, I stopped everything else to focus on swimming. What seemed to be a significant setback in athletics ended up helping me find my passion. I have now been swimming for six years and hope to swim in college.
I swim for my teammates, who are my second family. I would do anything for my team, and they would do anything for me. That is what you get when you are a part of a swim team with amazing people. I swim for my coaches, the people who have always believed in me. They have been a huge support in my successes and failures, and they are one of the reasons I swim. When I fail and I am overly critical of myself, they are always there to help me see the reality of the situation and pick me up. But when I succeed, they are always there to help me celebrate.
I swim for the feeling of pride that rushes through me when I look up at the board and see I achieved my goal. Achieving goal times makes all of the early practices and days of double practices worth it. It solidifies all the hard work I put into the sport. Although the feeling of accomplishment is great, I also find myself swimming for the feeling of motivation that sets at the bottom of my stomach when I look up at the board after I have missed my goal.
Achievement is empowering, but failure is just as important to me because it gives me something to fuel my competitive fire. The feeling of missing my goals by tenths and hundredths never leaves me and it pushes me to do better. Every hard practice, every tough set, every time I want to give up, I use that feeling as motivation to get more memories with the feeling of pride.
Mike Lewis | USA Swimming Photographer | San Diego, Calif.
What took me to swimming was I had a bad little league baseball tryout experience. I think I was nine years old. It was the thing every kid was doing, and I went and I was completely uncomfortable. I remember the feeling of being scared and awkward and feeling like this was not something for me.
I think it’s the type of experience, when we take the time to look back as adults and have the ability to be more self-reflective, we see we were kind of being that square peg in a round hole. The baseball thing was a bummer, and I think I probably cried and I just really felt like, “Gosh, this is what I’m supposed to do. Everybody else does this.” I was going to get a trophy and wear the hat and it just was horrible.
Growing up, we didn’t have a pool at my house, but we had friends who had pools and there was the high school pool that was nearby. Pools were always a place that I had complete joy. After the tryout, my dad took me to a pool, and that was the medicine. I felt better and I had fun, and a lifeguard said to my dad, “He’s a good swimmer. He should be a on a swim team.” I think many people in the sport have a similar origin story. Somebody sees them, somebody says you’re good, somebody says go join a swim team.
From then on, my parents took me to a local swim team and the rest is history. One of the funny stories is that at one of the first workouts, the coach said we were going to do hundreds, and I started freaking out because I thought he meant a hundred laps. “What? I’m the new kid. I can’t do hundreds!”
Swimming is definitely part of my figurative DNA. It’s where I find peace, it’s where I find serenity. Swimming makes a good day better and a bad day manageable. It’s central to my mental health and I have no reservations in saying that any challenges that I’ve had in my life—any depression or anxiety—are often mitigated by the swim. It’s the swim that makes it right.
My passion for photography melding with this deep connection with swimming really informs how I see the sport and how I let it come through my lens. I really operate through the standpoint of seeing and not looking. If you’re looking, it’s like trying to swim too hard. The key to good swimming is knowing when to pull and when to glide, and I use the same general philosophy when it comes to my work. Let it come to me rather than forcing it.
A cornerstone of my philosophy is that my photography is not about me. My work is about this sport and this activity that means everything to me. I really try to separate myself and my ego from my work. It helps me engage in it in a way that creates what comes out of the camera.
There’s the function of my job as a swimming photographer—being able to be a mirror, to reflect back on this thing that I have a deep reverence for—that is so important to me. So much of life is ephemeral. It comes before us and then it’s gone. As a photographer, you’re capturing these moments, literally fractions of a second, that do last and stay with us in a way that allows us to re-experience or experience for the first time our exposure to any particular image. Hopefully I can share these experiences in ways that motivate and inspire people to be a part of the sport wherever they are as a stakeholder, whether as a swimmer, an official or a team partner.
So those functional aspects of my work as a photographer are important and they inspire me, and they plug in to my creative DNA, but there’s something on top of this when it comes to the human side. There are those incidental social contacts that are so instrumental, so uplifting, so critical to the experience. Walking by and saying hi to Ryan Murphy at a meet or catching up with an official I regularly see on deck and saying hi or seeing my friends and colleagues at USA Swimming are instrumental to my social life and my life as a whole, that I admire and respect tremendously. Swimming is a family.
The obligatory groans at early-morning practices? The swimmer hair? The communal joy of a dropped tenth? That’s swimming.
The full spectrum of feels — elation, heartache, accomplishment, disappointment, belonging? That’s swimming.
"My Why" is a series of candid testimonials shared by individuals who believe in the power of swimming. Because everyone — athlete, coach, official, family member — has a story.
Presley Baber | Kansas City Blazers national team swimmer (16) | Overland Park, Kan.
My love for swimming began early, around age four or five. At the neighborhood pool, all I would do is swim laps back and forth. However, I also loved soccer and basketball, so my competitive swimming journey didn’t begin until I was 10.
After I developed knee pain for about a year, I found out I had osteochondritis dissecans and was told I needed surgery. My doctor told me that I was not able to run for a year and the only sport I could participate in was swimming. So, a few weeks after I had my knee surgery in December 2014, I started swimming with the Blazers. It started solely as physical therapy, but after that year when I couldn’t run, I fell in love with the sport of swimming.
I continued playing soccer while swimming with the Blazers from 2016-2018. Finally, in 2018 at a meet in Columbia [Mo.], I realized all I wanted to do was keep swimming. After that meet, I stopped everything else to focus on swimming. What seemed to be a significant setback in athletics ended up helping me find my passion. I have now been swimming for six years and hope to swim in college.
I swim for my teammates, who are my second family. I would do anything for my team, and they would do anything for me. That is what you get when you are a part of a swim team with amazing people. I swim for my coaches, the people who have always believed in me. They have been a huge support in my successes and failures, and they are one of the reasons I swim. When I fail and I am overly critical of myself, they are always there to help me see the reality of the situation and pick me up. But when I succeed, they are always there to help me celebrate.
I swim for the feeling of pride that rushes through me when I look up at the board and see I achieved my goal. Achieving goal times makes all of the early practices and days of double practices worth it. It solidifies all the hard work I put into the sport. Although the feeling of accomplishment is great, I also find myself swimming for the feeling of motivation that sets at the bottom of my stomach when I look up at the board after I have missed my goal.
Achievement is empowering, but failure is just as important to me because it gives me something to fuel my competitive fire. The feeling of missing my goals by tenths and hundredths never leaves me and it pushes me to do better. Every hard practice, every tough set, every time I want to give up, I use that feeling as motivation to get more memories with the feeling of pride.
Mike Lewis | USA Swimming Photographer | San Diego, Calif.
What took me to swimming was I had a bad little league baseball tryout experience. I think I was nine years old. It was the thing every kid was doing, and I went and I was completely uncomfortable. I remember the feeling of being scared and awkward and feeling like this was not something for me.
I think it’s the type of experience, when we take the time to look back as adults and have the ability to be more self-reflective, we see we were kind of being that square peg in a round hole. The baseball thing was a bummer, and I think I probably cried and I just really felt like, “Gosh, this is what I’m supposed to do. Everybody else does this.” I was going to get a trophy and wear the hat and it just was horrible.
Growing up, we didn’t have a pool at my house, but we had friends who had pools and there was the high school pool that was nearby. Pools were always a place that I had complete joy. After the tryout, my dad took me to a pool, and that was the medicine. I felt better and I had fun, and a lifeguard said to my dad, “He’s a good swimmer. He should be a on a swim team.” I think many people in the sport have a similar origin story. Somebody sees them, somebody says you’re good, somebody says go join a swim team.
From then on, my parents took me to a local swim team and the rest is history. One of the funny stories is that at one of the first workouts, the coach said we were going to do hundreds, and I started freaking out because I thought he meant a hundred laps. “What? I’m the new kid. I can’t do hundreds!”
Swimming is definitely part of my figurative DNA. It’s where I find peace, it’s where I find serenity. Swimming makes a good day better and a bad day manageable. It’s central to my mental health and I have no reservations in saying that any challenges that I’ve had in my life—any depression or anxiety—are often mitigated by the swim. It’s the swim that makes it right.
My passion for photography melding with this deep connection with swimming really informs how I see the sport and how I let it come through my lens. I really operate through the standpoint of seeing and not looking. If you’re looking, it’s like trying to swim too hard. The key to good swimming is knowing when to pull and when to glide, and I use the same general philosophy when it comes to my work. Let it come to me rather than forcing it.
A cornerstone of my philosophy is that my photography is not about me. My work is about this sport and this activity that means everything to me. I really try to separate myself and my ego from my work. It helps me engage in it in a way that creates what comes out of the camera.
There’s the function of my job as a swimming photographer—being able to be a mirror, to reflect back on this thing that I have a deep reverence for—that is so important to me. So much of life is ephemeral. It comes before us and then it’s gone. As a photographer, you’re capturing these moments, literally fractions of a second, that do last and stay with us in a way that allows us to re-experience or experience for the first time our exposure to any particular image. Hopefully I can share these experiences in ways that motivate and inspire people to be a part of the sport wherever they are as a stakeholder, whether as a swimmer, an official or a team partner.
So those functional aspects of my work as a photographer are important and they inspire me, and they plug in to my creative DNA, but there’s something on top of this when it comes to the human side. There are those incidental social contacts that are so instrumental, so uplifting, so critical to the experience. Walking by and saying hi to Ryan Murphy at a meet or catching up with an official I regularly see on deck and saying hi or seeing my friends and colleagues at USA Swimming are instrumental to my social life and my life as a whole, that I admire and respect tremendously. Swimming is a family.