Price Kinney - Women's Swimming and Diving

Price Kinney is a captain for the 2012-13 Carnegie Mellon women's swimming and diving team. Kinney is a senior and majoring in chemical engineering.

While searching the internet for colleges with top notch engineering programs and a swim team before my senior year of high school, I landed on Carnegie Mellon. I’d never heard of the school or even planned on going so far away from home, but on paper CMU seemed to be the perfect fit.

Coming to CMU, there is no doubt that I was a typical frazzled freshman trying to balance my course load with a demanding swimming schedule, something that had come so easily in high school.  I’ll never forget struggling so terribly with my first-year physics class and talking to one of the seniors on the team, a Chemical Engineering major.  She too had some difficulties with her first-year physics class. But there she was, a senior, loving her major, excelling in her engineering classes and still an integral part of the swim team.  She was quick to offer advice about available academic resources and assured me that this class wouldn’t kill me.  Sometimes I think back to that moment and laugh at my freshman self for being such a mess.  Nonetheless, I was thankful for such supportive upperclass team members.

After a frustrating freshman year not achieving any of my best times from high school, I realized that the point of college swimming was much more than personal success.   The beauty of swimming at a school like CMU is that every member of your team is there because they want to be and because they have some kind of love for the sport.  Once I realized I needed to put aside my stress about personal performance, everything became much easier.  Practice was enjoyable and I learned to embrace the process over the next four years.  Through the tough training and early mornings I found a new love for the sport, a love that grew out of community with my teammates.  There is nothing more rewarding than being in the middle of a hard set and hearing one of your lane mates tell you: “you got this” or “dig deeper.”

I know looking back at my experiences on the swim team I won’t remember the specific times from my events at every single dual meet, or the exact places I got at UAAs. I’ll remember the relationships I built at 6 a.m. in the weight room lifting and singing along to country music, the human pyramids built on the beach at training trip between practices and the fun we had during all of our travel meets.