While Rebecca Soni had not really thought about competitive swimming until she was 10 years old, once she began, it literally became impossible to pull her out of the water.##M:[more]##
Even during her senior year in high school, during a bout with mono, she left her house without telling her mother and drove to Piscataway to avoid missing practice, recalls Tom Speedling, head coach at the Scarlet Aquatic Club in Piscataway, where Rebecca swam from the time she was 13 until she left for college.
“She looked like she had swallowed a softball — I never saw someone’s neck out like that,” says Speedling. He says she was out for a few days, but decided she wasn’t staying home any longer. “Her mom called and asked if she was here. I actually had to kick her out of practice. That’s the kind of work ethic she has — she’ll never miss, ever.”
And while the 21-year-old former Plainsboro resident and High School North graduate certainly has the talent and the work ethic needed to make her one of the top 20 swimmers in the world and land her on the U.S. Olympic swim team and headed for Beijing, she was never one to flaunt it.
“She always preferred to be anonymous,” says Speedling. “I noticed that when she came to us when she was 13. She was a really quiet kid. She doesn’t like any attention. She’s still like that.”
Soni moved to Plainsboro shortly before sixth grade from Freehold because of its closer location to her parents’ jobs and because it was closer to the pool in Piscataway. Her mother is a nurse and her father is in real estate, but both moved to Arizona after Soni began college at the University of Southern California.
Speaking by phone from Stanford, where she was training for the Olympics in August, Soni said she began swimming when she was 10 years old. Her sister had begun swimming before her, and she would attend her practices with their mother. One day, she says, her mother “just decided to put me in the pool with her.”
Before swimming, Soni had played gymnastics, but she began to take swimming more seriously, and soon joined the Scarlet Aquatic Club. Some of the club’s commitments include swim practices at 5:15 a.m. before school. “The older you get, the harder it is to get on the club,” says Speedling. “We like to teach them ourselves and develop them as they go.”
Since hitting the water, Soni has certainly garnered some achievements worth acclaim. Earlier this month, Soni won the 200 breaststroke at the Olympic trials with a time of 2:22.60, coming close to setting a new American record, missing it by 16-hundredths of a second. A member of the U.S. National Team, Soni holds USC records in the 100 and 200-yard breast, as well as the 200 and 400-yard medley relays. When she left high school, she was ranked fifth and was a national champion, says Speedling. She is also the two-time defending NCAA champion in the 200 breaststroke, and in 2004, she was a semifinalist in the 200 meter breaststroke in her first Olympic trials.
From the get go, Speedling says he noticed Soni was up for the challenge to do anything, and she always liked to race the fastest swimmers she could. Speedling says he does not let his club members swim for high schools because “it’s very low level swimming. She never wanted to, and she never swam a day for high school because she was not interested.”
Soni confirms this, and says she felt swimming for the team at North would take away from her practice time. “For me it was more important to do heavy training than high school swimming,” she said.
Even though she didn’t compete in high school, “she could have been a champion four years in a row,” says Speedling. “She was head and shoulders better than all the people in high school in the state, but that’s not what she was after.”
Instead, she was always focused on doing well in the Nationals, he said, where she could compete against the world’s fastest swimmers. “It gives kids good self-esteem to win,” says Speedling. “It doesn’t give her self-esteem to beat up on awful swimmers. Instead, she asks, ‘Who can I measure myself against who is the best in the world?’”
Still, training for swimming has always been more of a personal goal for Soni, who did not want to win for the attention, he insists. He recalls that one year, when Soni returned from Nationals that August with a second-place finish, and one of her friends from high school was visiting, Soni’s mother had mentioned Soni’s recent achievement, and the friend asked, “What do you mean?” Speedling recalls. Soni had never mentioned the feat to her friend.
Soni says she was excited as she worked her way through the Olympic trials and onto the team. “I wanted to win it,” she says of the 200 breaststroke. Still, she says the feat still hasn’t registered in her mind. Currently, she is focusing on training and relaxing and says that when it comes time for the Olympic competition, her main focus is to just be confident. “I’m going to try to think of my own race, and try not to psyche myself out by looking at the other” swimmers, she says.
After the Olympics, while Soni has not yet thought about long-term future plans, she says she does plan to resume her life as she knows it — finishing up her senior year at USC, where she is majoring in communications, and of course, swimming with the college team.
— Cara Latham
