DIII Senior Spotlight: Johnson and Drukker

Division III is remarkable. The student-athletes who attend and compete at DIII colleges do so without monetary compensation and often in conjunction with rigorous academic schedules and a good deal of extracurricular activities thrown in as well. Over the course of my own collegiate career, I shared pool space with athletes who developed robots, helped with political campaigns or competed in foreign countries. It is these stories and these athletes who best exemplify what it means to be a student-athlete at the Division III level.

What follows is a tribute to the athletes of Division III, showcasing seniors from across the country who have brought their own passion to swimming and academia. This series of articles strives to capture some of the many incredible, interesting or quirky things our swimming and diving seniors have done while out in the wider world.

All hail Division III.

Staying in the Game

Carroll University Senior Kristy Johnson (Image courtesy of Carroll Athletics)

For Kristy Johnson, senior year was a concept she left behind when she applied for – and got into – the Carroll University Physical Therapy program. Carroll offers a three year undergrad option geared towards those interested in physical therapy with the additional three years of graduate study beginning during what would usually be the senior year of study. This system knocks a year off the seven year timeline (four undergrad, three graduate) and is a good option for those who know what they want to do with their lives, fresh out of high school.

Johnson finished her undergrad in May of 2013 and moved straight into the graduate program for the 2013-14 season. In what was her first year of graduate school, Johnson served the team as a captain. She had tremendous success, both individually and on relays, swimming personal bests and being part of 200 freestyle relay that reset multiple records in the Midwest Conference.

So as she enters her fifth year of schooling, how is Johnson still representing Carroll collegiately?

The answer lies in a little NCAA stipulation: an athlete has four years of collegiate eligibility in each sport, provided those years are redeemed within ten consecutive semesters of full time enrollment. The rest of the answer is in Johnson’s own passion for a myriad of athletic activities.

“I’ve always been a student-athlete,” Johnson said. “There was never a season in high school where I wasn’t doing a sport.” In high school, Johnson competed in volleyball, softball, and basketball as well as swimming. “I always swam,” she recounted, “but in seventh grade […] my inner ear got really bad.” Unable to stomach the constant nausea practices induced, Johnson dropped out of swimming to pursue her land sports.

In her junior year of high school, Johnson returned to swimming. “I didn’t make the volleyball team,” she said. “My dad emailed the swim coach and said, ‘Hey, my daughter still wants to be in athletics; is there chance she can show up for practice?’” With the coach’s approval, Johnson reappeared on the pool deck. “I showed up. I threw up for about two weeks in practice. But I pushed through it. My body got used to it. And that’s when my whole swimming career kicked off again.”

Nausea and inner ear problems weren’t the last challenges Johnson faced when it came to swimming, however. When she selected Carroll University to be her college, she ran into a problem. “I knew when I went to college that I wanted the opportunity to not only do one sport, but possibly two,” Johnson said. The difficulty there was that the swim coach at the time insisted she choose between swimming and softball. Johnson went with softball.

The following year, when the coaching staff of the swim team changed, Johnson’s softball coach contacted the new head swim coach with an offer: “If you want to make it work, I’ll make it work.” And thus was born Johnson’s two-sport season. She pitched for softball while on taper for swimming Conference, putting in 25 hours a week of practice between the two sports of that didn’t overlap. She placed second in the Conference in the 50 freestyle.

“It was mind-boggling,” Johnson said. “I didn’t know I would be able to come in and do so well.” At the conclusion of her sophomore year of college, Johnson made the decision to switch her full time commitment from softball to swimming. After her junior year of college – and her second full season of swimming – Johnson moved up to Carroll’s doctorate program and kept right on swimming. And swimming well.

“The physical therapy program is one of Carroll’s largest programs, and tons of kids come in, in athletics thinking they’re going to do athletics for three years and their fourth year they’re going to quit and they’re just going to focus on school,” said Johnson. For her, swimming while in the doctorate program was more than just continuing to compete because she loves the sport. With ten teammates who are also on track in the physical therapy program, Johnson said, “I want to show them that it is possible. When you’re a student-athlete, you’re a student-athlete; when you’ve been that your whole life, you can figure it out.”

In the coming year, Johnson will continue to show her teammates that it can be done. While she served as a captain in the last season, she said she had stepped down for this coming year because her first clinical for her doctorate would take her down to Texas from October to December. That would leave the three weeks at the start of practice to introduce herself to new teammates and the month or so from January to Conference for Johnson. “That was hard for me,” Johnson admitted. “I like being in the weight room with the girls […] because I help train them and I like having that camaraderie.”

Yet this career path has also been a dream of hers since eighth grade. After growing up in a household with a mother who was nurse, Johnson knew she wanted to “be that person who people came to for questions.” She is passionate about helping those who need help, or a gentle push in the right direction. Johnson’s first desire is to work with amputees in physical therapy.

“A lot of [amputees] did come from tragic events where, before that, they were super active.” This interest was prompted by talks given by several amputees in physical therapy who had been athletes before injury. “Some of them go water-skiing, they go rock climbing, they snow ski – and that was just amazing to see the transition of them being an athlete, and then their injury happening, and then recovering and going back to doing what they love to do.”

A close second is helping high school athletes whom she believes specialize far too soon. “They’re coming out with injuries that they shouldn’t have until they’re in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s even. I think high school’s a good age to teach [these athletes] proper body mechanics and prevention of injuries.” Johnson is a strong advocate of high school student-athletes engaging in multiple sports to decrease the risk of injury due to overuse. Once athletes hit college, then it’s more acceptable to specialize. “Your body’s mature; you should be doing things with better form and in high school, everyone’s still getting used to their own body. […] Not specializing and having fun with it is a way to prevent injuries and surgeries.”

Having fun is also a reason Johnson is an advocate of athletics in Division III. “When you show up to practice, it’s because you want to be there, it’s not because you have a scholarship, it’s not because your parents want you to go here because you’re getting money off. Everyone is there because they want to be there.” For Johnson in particular, the enjoyment factor is key, especially with her unique experience of college athletics. With everyone her own age graduated and gone, Johnson remarked, “I kind of almost feel like a freshman again.”

A + B + C = The End of World Hunger

Gordon College Senior Austin Drukker (Image courtesy of Gordon Athletics)

Gordon College senior Austin Drukker has also watched his team grow and become more competitive since he first arrived on the scene as a freshman. While the Gordon College swim building has been around for nearly three decades (CHECK), the swim program itself didn’t really get off the ground as a serious team until about four years ago, according to Drukker.

When Drukker – who is a math and economics double major – was looking at colleges, he had narrowed his options down to Gordon, Calvin and Messiah. Determining where to go fell to location and opportunity: Gordon was closer to home, and “Calvin College is known for being a very competitive swimming program […] where Gordon at the time was a less competitive program. So I thought I could make more of a contribution at Gordon.”

Originally, Drukker had even debated not swimming in college. “I didn’t think I was even going to swim. I said that’s okay; I’ll work on my academics and then my coach really pushed me to join, and I did. And now I’m a captain.” In three years, Drukker explained that his place on the team has changed drastically. “My role has evolved from being the fastest swimmer to being more of a supporting role,” Drukker said. “Every year the new swimmers coming in are faster and faster.”

According to Drukker, the program at Gordon enjoyed its first ever victory in a meet last year. “Last year we won our first meet – maybe that doesn’t sound so great, but we did win a meet, so that was great for us.” Gordon may also have an opportunity to win many more meets in the coming year: Drukker said, “Looking ahead at our schedule this year, looks like we might be able to have a winning record which would just be fantastic for the school and for the program.”

A winning record – being victorious in more than half the meets they compete in – may sound a touch ambitious for a developing team, but goals are what push athletes and teams forward. “The school has really started paying attention to the swim program,” Drukker said. It helps that Drukker and his co-captain “Have that experience of where we’ve been, and where we need to go.”

Figuring out where to go doesn’t seem to present much of a problem to the Bedford, New Hampshire native. Over the summer, Drukker did math research with one of his professors. The ten weeks of research foreshadow what he will eventually end up doing post college: graduate research in his field. What Drukker did this summer was a continuation of a larger project which had been begun prior to his involvement.

“We were basically developing a model to predict food availability in certain parts of Sudan, to help out the World Food Program implement its voucher programs,” Drukker explained. The World Food Program is a UN Organization. Drukker’s focus was the creation of a model for availability to go with a previously developed model used to predict the costs of food. “The goal was to bring those two aspects together to help inform the voucher program,” Drukker said.

So what does the creation of a mathematical model entail?

“It was a forty-hour a week, full time job,” Drukker said. For a math project, he spent an inordinate amount of time reading. “[I was] mostly reading background reports about what had been done already and working on creating a model with my advisor to get the math correct.” In the final few weeks, Drukker collected his findings and organized them into a report.

“We didn’t have any major breakthroughs,” he said, “but we did end up developing a model that we thought would be useful, so it’s in the report. And then hopefully it will be read by the people at World Food Program and they’ll like it and ask for more.” While Drukker admits the experience was invaluable, he also explained that it was different from doing school work where tasks vary; this was a single task over a longer course of time and took a particular focus and energy.

“It wasn’t all fun,” Drukker said, “[but] looking back, I really enjoyed the experience.”