Category Archives: Tara Kirk Sell

Adrian named one of six Team USA captains

Nathan Adrian smiles after winning the mens 100-meter freestyle final at the U.S. Olympic swimming trials, Thursday, June 30, 2016, in Omaha, Neb. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
Nathan Adrian smiles after winning the mens 100-meter freestyle final at the U.S. Olympic swimming trials, Thursday, June 30, 2016, in Omaha, Neb. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)

Bremerton’s Nathan Adrian was selected by his Olympic peers on Tuesday as one of six captains to head Team USA as they prepare for the Rio Games in a matter of weeks.

Adrian was selected as a captain along with Michael Phelps and Anthony Ervin for the men’s team. On the women’s side, captains are Cammile Adams, Elizabeth Beisel and Allison Schmitt. The team is training in San Antonio this week before heading to Atlanta for more training and then to Brazil.

Adrian is not the first Bremerton swimmer to be named a team captain. That honor goes to Tara Kirk Sell who was named for the women’s team for the 2004 Athens Games.

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Olympian Tara Kirk Sell says don’t cancel the Olympics because of Zika

Bremerton’s Tara Kirk Sell, and her sister Dana Kirk Martin, paved the way for swimmers to dream big. The sisters were the first to make a U.S. Olympic swim team when they competed at the 2004 Athens Games. Tara won a silver medal as a member of the 4×100 medley relay.

She now lives in Baltimore with her husband and two young children, and wrote this op-ed piece for the Baltimore Sun. Kirk Sell, a public health researcher and associate at the UPMC Center for Health Security in Baltimore, gives a great insightful voice on the public health concerns of Zika from the Olympians point of view. There has been talk from some in the public health sector to cancel the Rio Olympics due to Zika.

Here’s an excerpt;

“With the Zika outbreak in the Americas raging and the growth of scientific support about potential birth defects from maternal infection, some in public health have called for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio to be postponed or moved. As a fellow public health researcher and a pregnant Olympian swimmer and silver medalist at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, I have a close-up perspective on both sides of this issue and believe this opinion does not balance the risks appropriately.”

You can read the full article here.

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Bremerton/Silverdale breaks into USA Swimming’s top swim cities list

We may not be the biggest community in Western Washington considering who our next door neighbors are — I’m looking at you Seattle and Tacoma — but we did something else those two cities didn’t do this week.

The Bremerton/Silverdale area made the Top 20 of USA Swimming/SpeedoUSA’s Top Swim Cities on Wednesda50SwimCitiesInfographicTOP.gify.

Bremerton/Silverdale is ranked 17th overall for all cities with a population of 150,000-249,999. (Check out the graphic on the left. That’s us in the corner!! OK, OK, maybe it’s Seattle but I like to think it’s Bremerton).

“It’s amazing,” said Olympic Aquatic Club coach Patrick Hamilton, “it’s good to get recognized.”

The top city in the smaller category is Columbia, Missouri. It was ranked first based on its high percentage of USA Swimming members, top USA Swimming athletes and large number of fitness swimmers.

Hamilton said Kitsap has a strong swimming community — from parents to officials to volunteers — who make the meets work year round.

“I know our team, Olympic Aquatic Club, we host five meets a year which is a lot of work,” he said, adding volunteer parents typically spend 40-50 hours during the three day meets.

“It’s just a wholesome sport and the community has embraced it,” he said.

The top swim cities showcase what’s great about the sport of swimming, said Matt Farrell, chief marketing officer of USA Swimming in a news release.

“We want to invite people of all ages across the country to join the sport of swimming and we hope this list inspires more kids and families to get involved,” he said.

Bremerton YMCA head coach Marilyn Grindrod said swimming is beneficial no matter if you compete at an elite level or recreationally.

“It’s a sport for life,” she said.

Bremerton-Silverdale club teams include Bremerton Family YMCA, Haselwood Family YMCA Silverdale and Olympic Aquatic Club. Kitsap’s club teams also include Poulsbo Piranhas, Puget Sound Swim Club, Bainbridge Island Swim Team, Bangor Swim Team, and reaching a little further out on the peninsula, Port Angeles and Port Townsend swim teams.

We just missed the cut off for populations with 244,000 or greater, which would have placed Bremerton/Silverdale 13th in the larger category, the Top 50. Seattle is ranked No. 21 in the larger category, with Anchorage, Alaska, coming in at No. 19.Unknown

No other Pacific Northwest cities made the list.

Ann Arbor, Michigan, was once again ranked No. 1 for the second year in the larger category, followed by Durham, North Carolina; Austin, Texas; Madison, Wisconsin; Raleigh-Cary, North Carolina; Fort Collins, Colorado; Washington, D.C.; and Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, Connecticut.

Ann Arbor repeated as best swim city, due in part to having the largest percentage of top USA Swimming athletes per population — more than 60 Olympians have come from the University of Michigan’s swim program and area club teams, said USA Swimming. San Jose-Santa Clara is at No. 2.

Each city is ranked based on an aggregate score in categories including the percentage of active swimmers and swim clubs, the number of accessible pools (Bremerton/Silverdale has three) and volume of top-level swimmers from the area. It also took into account the number of USA Swimming members, number of U.S. Masters (adult) swimmers, and the number of USA Swimming clubs.

California, with five cities in the top 17, and Colorado (four in the top 16) were the highest-ranking states. Cities in the top 50 had populations of 250,000 or more.

It’s pretty cool that Bremerton/Silverdale can lay claim to not only national champions, but also high school state champions, age-group champions, masters champions, and, of course, three Olympians in Bremerton’s Tara and Dana Kirk (2004 Olympics) and Nathan Adrian (2008, 2012). If we’re timages-1o include Bainbridge Island, then Emily Silver (2012) makes it four from Kitsap.

“We’ve had some amazing athletes moving up the chain,” Grindrod said. “When those kids were learning to swim they had a passion. They were smart and their parents knew something special about them.”

Speaking of Adrian, the San Francisco-Oakland area moved up to No. 3, which is where he resides and trains with California’s post-grad group that includes fellow Olympic champions Aimagesnthony Ervin and Natalie Coughlin. It’s also home to 10 percent of the country’s U.S. Masters swimmers, more than any other city.

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Bremerton’s Tara Kirk added to Stanford Hall of Fame

Stanford University announced on Wednesday that Bremerton Olympian Tara Kirk is one of eight members of its 2015 Hall of Fame Class.

Here’s what her bio says about her induction:

US Olympic Trials Swimming“Kirk, who won 11 NCAA titles in record-breaking times, became the first swimmer in NCAA history to win a breaststroke event for four consecutive years in the 100-yard breaststroke. She swam breaststroke leg on Stanford’s winning 200 and 400 yard medley relay teams in 2001 and 2002 in addition to her seven NCAA individual crowns from 2001 to 2004. Kirk also won 14 Pac-10 titles, was a 17-time All-American and two-time team captain. She held American records in seven different events (five individual and two relay) while at Stanford, holding the American record in the 100 yard breaststroke for 10 years. Kirk was undefeated in all 35 of her college races in the 100 breaststroke and won her final 19 collegiate 200 breaststroke races.

During her senior year, Kirk set a world record in the 100-meter breaststroke (short course), captured the Honda Award, presented to the nation’s Most Outstanding Collegiate Women’s Athlete for swimming and diving, was named the NCAA Swimmer of the Year, and received the Honda-Broderick Cup, presented to the best college female athlete in the country. She has won 15 medals in international competition, including a silver medal in the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens.

Her younger sister, Dana Kirk, also a Stanford swimmer, also made the 2004 U.S. Olympic team, and they became the first sisters to swim on the same U.S. Olympic team. Kirk graduated with a BA in human biology and MA in anthropological sciences and was a Rhodes Scholar finalist in 2005. She works as an associate at the UPMC Center for Health Security, where her primary focus is improving public health policy and practice to reduce the impacts of disasters and terrorism.”

The eight inductees will be honored at a private reception and dinner at Bing Concert Hall on Friday, Oct. 16. The class will also be introduced at halftime of Stanford’s football game against UCLA on Thursday, Oct. 15 (7:30 p.m. PT, ESPN).

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Kirk, Adrian continue to win at US Masters nationals

This weekend is making me a reminisce a little.

Fourteen years ago I started covering swimming on the peninsula, just about the time that the sport really started gaining ground and national recognition thanks to a handful of swimmers from Bremerton and Bainbridge.

Those swimmers included breaststroker Tara Kirk, sister and butterflyer Dana Kirk of Bremerton, Helen Silver, backstroke, and sister Emily Silver, freestyle, of Bainbridge Island and Bremerton’s Justin Adrian, fly/free and eventually his brother Nathan Adrian.

It was an exciting time as I was able to travel to California for a week where the Kirks were attending Stanford and Helen Silver was at California, and we ran that story when I came back. The following year in 2004 we went to Long Beach for the U.S. Olympic Trials and watched as both Tara and Dana made the Olympic team — the first time sisters had made the same team in USA Swimming history. The Silvers and Justin competed as well so there was a lot for one hometown reporter to cover. I distinctly remember Justin being so stoked to swim in the final of the 100 butterfly, a race won by Michael Phelps, before he officially called it the end of his career.

After the Kirks made the team it wasn’t long before I received a call from our editor at the time to let me know that the paper was going to send myself and a photographer to Athens to cover the Olympics. I’ll never forget my two weeks there as we tried to cover the world’s biggest sporting spectacle from the outside looking in. Because we didn’t have full credentials we spent a lot of time with the Kirks’ parents, Jeff and Margaret, as they toured Athens, the Acropolis and went to beach parties and such.

We did manage to find our way into one swimming event, Tara’s 100 breaststroke final, and that was thrilling.  She lead after the first 50 meters and I remember sitting in the stands, my photographer trying to shoot from the stands (yes, we weren’t supposed to) and thinking that ‘I’m watching the Olympics and our hometown swimmer is trying to win a medal.’ Surreal.

Jumping ahead to Saturday, it’s been great seeing Dana competing at the U.S. Masters Spring National Championships at Santa Clara, Calif. She gave the U.S. trials one more shot in 2012 (good for her as a back injury curtailed her career far too soon) and now that she’s coaching I’m sure it’s also been fun to get back into the competition pool.

Dana won the 100-yard individual medley in the 25-29 age category in 57.75 seconds. She also finished third in the 100 free in 52.36.

Nathan continues to be the best American sprinter. He won the 100 free in the 25-29 age category in a national age-group record of 41.08, besting the previous time of Darian Townsend’s mark of 42.13 from last Dec. Townsend finished second in Saturday’s race in 43.13. That means Nathan won by almost two seconds. Wow. The time also tied his American record.

Dana has one more race Sunday and I’ll post another update then.

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Mesa post-race interview with Nathan Adrian

Swimswam.com caught up with Nathan Adrian after his race in the 100-freestyle on Thursday at the Mesa Grand Prix in Arizona.

You can check it out here.

And… here’s the post-race video from Friday’s 50 free. Nathan talks about his upcoming schedule, which includes the Mare Nostrum series, which Olympic silver medalist and fellow Bremertonian Tara Kirk Sell swam, and the Santa Clara Invite in August.

 

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Nathan Adrian larger than life role model for Kitsap

Nathan Adrian, it seems, will always be a favored son of Bremerton. That’s no less true today as it was the moment he won his first individual Olympic gold medal at the London Olympics in 2012.

Adrian was back in B-town Monday to help the Bremerton Family YMCA and Bremerton School District kickoff its water safety program for all district third graders. That program will begin Jan. 14.

The excitement on the faces of the kids was only outdone by the admiration in the eyes of their parents on Monday.

About 40 children, mostly third graders, their families and staff of the six BSD elementaries were invited to the event at the YMCA.

Not only does Adrian stand 6-foot-6, which will draw your eye anyway, but every single adult knew the accomplishments he’s made in and out of the pool. The round of applause he received when YMCA aquatics director Rich Tate told the gathered crowd of his 4.0 GPA while in school at the University of California in 2012 was tremendous.

A hard work ethic breeds respect and Adrian has plenty of the latter from the Bremerton community.

“He is a huge role model for kids across the world,” said View Ridge teacher Katie Sprague. “These kids know that he went to our school, they know that he’s an Olympic medalist, but to get to see him in person and to get to see that they matter enough that he would come and show up and spend time signing autographs and answering questions, it’s a great bonus for these kids.”

Adrian believes it’s important to give back to the community that supports him so well.

“I have been blessed in my career with the ability to continue to swim and to excel at swimming, but at the same time that comes with a responsibility of giving back. Everybody has their different ways of giving back. This is just one great and perfectly timed (event), and it’s so fitting to come together with a swim program for a swimmer.”

Adrian didn’t have a world-class athlete visit his age-group or club teams when he was younger. He was always surrounded by them.

Adrian said having fellow Bremertonians Tara and Dana Kirk pave the way by swimming at the Olympics and in college (they both graduated from Stanford University) had a huge impact on him.

“I just saw them pave this amazing road,” he said. “That (swimming in college) became a reality, an option, as I got older. … I was really blessed that I got to experience what I experienced watching them.”

At Monday’s event Adrian was stopped at nearly every turn, as fans of all ages asked for pictures and autographs while he was given a tour of the facility since its remodel.

Quite frankly, it’s fun for me to see as well because I know how appreciative he is of the support he has whenever he comes home.

It’s a short stay for the holidays as Adrian will head back to Berkeley, Calif., later this week. He, and his teammates from Cal, including the post-grad group of Anthony Ervin and Natalie Coughlin, will go to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo., for some intensive high-altitude training in January.

“It’s fantastic training,” he said.

It’s also pretty hardcore.

Adrian’s next competition will be the Austin Grand Prix, Jan. 17-19, at the University of Texas. He’s also been invited for a meet in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, host of the 2016 Olympics. It’s a chance for American swimmers to get an idea of what it will be like in Rio in two years. If it happens, it would be February or March, and is something along the lines of the Duel in the Pool.

Adrian was also thrilled to learn that his Art of the Cap campaign by Speedo and artist Gianmarco Magnani, was a complete success. The caps, which were limited editions and included other artists that teamed with fellow Speedo athletes Dana Vollmer, Natalie Coughlin, Cullen Jones and Ryan Lochte. Proceeds from the sales of Adrian’s cap went to his charity, Kids Beating Cancer. All five caps sold out.

“That was really, really cool,” Adrian said. “To partner up with an artist and charity as well, I think they picked a perfect artist for me. I’m not super into abstract art … so I think the ship design, and having the anchor there, every time I see the cap in reminds me of driving into Bremerton (past the shipyard). It’s so iconic.”

 

 

 

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Nathan Adrian: 12th Man Flag Raiser

Consider it just another feather in the cap of Bremerton’s Olympic champion Nathan Adrian.

Adrian raised the 12th Man flag before Sunday’s Seattle Seahawks vs. Arizona Cardinals NFC West Division game at CenturyLink Field. The honor is reserved for celebrities, former athletes and other notables who have ties to Seattle and the Puget Sound area.

Adrian tweeted a photo before the game and had a photo go to with it, saying he “couldn’t be more stoked” to raise the flag.

He is not the first Bremerton swimmers to raise the flag however. That distinct honor belongs to Bremerton’s first family of swimming, Tara Kirk Sell and Dana Kirk Martin. They raised the flag after returning home from the 2004 Athens Games.

Adrian has also been on the field, along with other Bay Area Olympians, for the Oakland Athletics, San Francisco Giants and Oakland Raiders games.

Adrian, who lives in Berkeley where he trains with California, flew into Sea-Tac Saturday, attended the game Sunday and will be back in Bremerton to celebrate the holidays with his family this week.

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New study links swimming to smarter kids

According to a three-year long study by the Griffith Institute for Educational Research in Australia, swim kids are smarter kids.

The study, which surveyed parents of 7,000 five-year-olds and younger in Australia, New Zealand and the United States, shows the swimming children reach developmental stages faster than other children.

Here’s an excerpt from the study;

As well as achieving physical milestones faster, children also scored significantly better in visual-motor skills such as cutting paper, colouring in and drawing lines and shapes, and many mathematically-related tasks. Their oral expression was also better as well as in the general areas of literacy and numeracy.

Here’s the story link on the USA Swimming website by Mike Gustafson.

From what I’ve seen during the last 13 years covering swimming in Kitsap, I tend to believe the study. All of our elite-level swimmers, Tara Kirk Sell, Dana Kirk, Nathan Adrian, Emily Silver and their siblings all excelled in high school and as undergrads and graduate students. Currently Tara is getting her doctorate in public health from Johns Hopkins.

Coincidence? Ummm, maybe. But I think the fact that so many of our swimmers started at a very young age helped in their development, both socially, physically and mentally.

Besides, is there anything cuter than a 1-2 year old in the water? I think not.

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Kirk sisters hosting swim clinic in Palo Alto

Palo Alto Stanford Aquatics-DKS coach Dana Kirk is hosting her second Women in Coaching Clinic at the Far Western Championships, Friday-Saturday, at Stanford University.

Kirk, a 2004 Olympian from Bremerton, will be joined by her sister, fellow 2004 Olympian and silver medalist Tara Kirk Sell. Kirk Sell will be speaking on how high school swimmers can make the transition from high school to college, and then college to becoming a professional swimmer.

Also headlining the clinic will be Rachel Stratton-Mills, one of only three female coaches to be have an athlete on the U.S. Olympic team in 2012, as well as the only female coach to have a swimmer on the U.S. National team and the U.S. National Youth team.

Former PASA coach Stephanie Fryberg, Dr. Susan Wood (former lacrosse coach) and Glenn Mills of goswim.tv will also be speaking at the clinic.

You can see a video of Dana talking about the clinic here.

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