University of Georgia swimmer Brittany MacLean was a youth hockey player, but she got in too many fights. Instead of letting her continue to use her fists as weapons, her parents decided to put her in a pool where she couldn’t hurt anyone.
A Toronto native, she still uses the same fighter mentality. In his 37 years as Georgia’s coach, Jack Bauerle said he has seen no one display the amount of grit MacLean has.
“She is one of those girls that just has perseverance written on her forehead,” UGA junior Olivia Smoliga said.
As a freshman and sophomore, MacLean was one of Georgia’s best swimmers, helping her team win two national championships. But then injuries derailed her junior season.
MacLean is healthy again, winning three events and swimmer of the meet at the recent SEC championships. At the NCAA swimming and diving championships at Georgia Tech’s McAuley Aquatic Center this week, MacLean could be the difference-maker as the Georgia women try to reclaim their place atop the national podium.
They got off to a good start Wednesday when MacLean teamed up with Hali Flickinger, Kylie Stewart and Meaghan Raab to win the 800 freestyle relay in a school-record time of 6:51.80.
“I want her to prove to everyone that even though she had a bad year,” Smoliga said, “(it) doesn’t mean that she can’t have an even better year than her sophomore year.”
At the end of the 2013-14 season, MacLean was at the pinnacle of her career. During the 2014 NCAA swimming and diving championships, MacLean was the dominant force in Georgia claiming its sixth national title.
The then-sophomore won the 500-yard freestyle and the 1,650 free and was part of UGA’s second-place 4x200 free relay team. One online news outlet selected her NCAA female swimmer of the year.
Then her excellence came to a halt.
MacLean had torn a labrum, a type of cartilage in the shoulder, in 2012. While she was able to accomplish all she did in the 2013-14 season despite the shoulder injury, a hamstring injury her junior year was too much to overcome.
During last year’s NCAAs she finished seventh in the 500 free and ninth in the 1,650 free. The biggest disappointment, she said, was watching her team slip to the second position on the podium, behind the University of California and knowing if she didn’t have the hamstring injury she could have done more for her team.
“It was a bit of a new experience to watch another team win,” she said.
Bauerle told her it was time to take a break.
“I told her, ‘You will have your time,’ ” Bauerle said.
She didn’t get in a pool for an entire month last summer. She said it felt like an eternity but that sacrifice has paid dividends.
This season she has improved her 200 free, 500 free and 1,650 free times by more than two and a half seconds each. She holds the Georgia record in the latter two.
Bauerle said his favorite part of this season was watching MacLean’s determination turn into records. It was the same determination that made her drop her gloves when she played hockey. And while most coaches could become turned off by a player getting into too many fights, Bauerle’s reaction, when her parents told him while he was recruiting her, was exactly the opposite.
“I figured that’s someone we want to have,” he said.
The Grady Sports Bureau is part of the sports media program at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
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