SUCCESS AT THE START
Light-based starting system helps all swimmers
The lights glow in sequence, almost rhythmic as they cycle through. Blinking red flashes and then a steady red accompany the “on the block” command. Blue illuminates to tell swimmers to “take their mark.” Green means go — and that is triggered by the pool’s starting system.
Gallaudet University rising senior Faye Frez-Albrecht focuses on the colors inches from her face and practices her start to swim backstroke.
Frez-Albrecht is deaf and legally blind. For two years, after she was disqualified from a meet because she did not make it to the starting blocks in time, Frez-Albrecht and her coach have led an effort to remove the competitive disadvantages faced in swim meets by athletes who are deaf and hard of hearing. The LED tube lights, tested repeatedly in the pool at Gallaudet, have been approved by the NCAA for use at the start of competitive races starting with the 2017-18 academic year.
It’s a victory for deaf swimmers compet-
“What we’re doing here ... is a grassroots effort that is going to end up eventually changing the way swimming races are started.” Larry Curran, Gallaudet swim coach
ing in college, but Frez-Albrecht ultimately might be known as the swimmer who changed how the sport starts its races. Not only does the innovative light system make it possible for deaf swimmers to get a fair shot, it also helps all swimmers improve their start times.
Light, after all, travels faster than sound.
“The basic problem that the deaf athletes have had to face forever — it’s that the way the sport has been set up, they make special rules to allow the deaf athletes to participate, but they don’t go anywhere near trying to make it fair,” said Larry Curran, Gallaudet’s head coach.
The special rules include hand signals or flashing strobe lights from the side of the pool, but both methods require deaf swimmers to turn their heads to the side to see when they can start. Curran estimates that costs them at least a half-second, while hearing athletes can simply start when they hear the normal oral commands.
“What we’re doing here with Faye is a grassroots effort that is going to end up eventually changing the way swimming races are started from kindergarten to the Olympics,” Curran said. “It’s going to take a little while to do that, but it will have international effects.” PATH TO ACTIVISM Frez-Albrecht was born with Usher syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects hearing and vision. She was born profoundly deaf, with accompanying balance issues, and started losing her vision around age 10.
She played a variety of sports growing up — soccer, basketball and track — and developed a love for swimming, though there were no swim teams for her to join until she enrolled at Gallaudet, a university federally chartered in 1864 to ensure the intellectual and professional advancement of deaf and hard of hearing individuals through American Sign Language and English.
“Swimming is the easiest sport to me,” Frez-Albrecht told USA TODAY Sports through an interpreter. “It doesn’t require a whole lot of vision. I have some balance issues outside of the water, but in the water I don’t feel that. When I’m on land, I fall easily. Other sports are pretty difficult for me. I’ve always had great teammates, of course, but in swimming it’s really just a place where I feel like I have skill and a pretty equal playing field.”
Curran, who had never met a deaf person before he came to Gallaudet in 2011, said athletes like Frez-Albrecht are what makes his work here so rewarding. That, and how much he and his deaf swimmers learn from one another.
“It doesn’t matter whether somebody comes in with Olympic experience or whether like Faye they’re really new to competitive swimming,” Curran said. “You see what they come in with, and then you see what they develop into, and it’s really amazing. In her case, the first time she swam the length of the pool, I wasn’t sure she was going to stop when she got there.
“By the end of the season, she was swimming the mile. She was doing the 400 individual medley. I put her in the 100 butterfly. She’s turned into a great utility swimmer.”
Her versatility only made her disqualification at the 2016 North Eastern Athletic Conference (NEAC) championships more disappointing — for Frez-Albrecht and the rest of the team.
“They were very rushed because they had started the meet an hour late,” Frez-Albrecht said. “I had been in the water and gotten out of the water to start my event, and my two assistant coaches were helping me to go toward the event — but there were a lot of things in the way, wires and so forth. They just went ahead and started the event before I had gotten to my block, and then I was disqualified.
“The policy is, if you’re disqualified for one event, you’re disqualified for the whole meet.”
Frez-Albrecht was done for the rest of the championship meet, though she was allowed to swim a 1,650-yard distance event for time but not points. She decided to post a vlog to Facebook about her experience. It has more than 89,000 views to date.
Seeking to help competitors such as herself, Frez-Albrecht and Curran pushed for meetings with the NCAA to improve accessibility at swim meets, not only within their conference but also for every college swimmer. HOW TECHNOLOGY COULD CHANGE THE SPORT And then Nick Santino came along with his light-based starting system.
Five years ago, Santino was working as a distributor for Colorado Time Systems, a company that specializes in aquatic timing, scoring and display systems, when a customer had asked if he thought he could develop a light that could remain close to the starting block to help a young deaf swimmer in Albany.
So he built a prototype, and it worked.
That led to a partnership with Doug Matchett, the director of USA Deaf Swimming, and some experimentation. Santino built a light system for a meet at Rochester Institute of Technology. Then, he took it to the 2015 USA Deaf Swimming championships in San Antonio, where he met Curran, who needed help supporting Frez-Albrecht’s grassroots efforts.
Santino began working with Gallaudet in April 2016, using its swimmers and pool to test his product. By July, he’d built a demo Reaction Lights System for the team. By August, he’d built a portable RLS to use at away meets. The lights, about the size of a microphone, are located beneath each starting block and protrude slightly, so they can be used for any event, including backstroke, which starts in the water.
Gallaudet, Santino and the NCAA worked together for months to understand the technology and incorporate the starting procedures. The NCAA wanted to test RLS to see if it reacted within one ten-thousandth of a second with the sport’s three major timing system companies, Colorado Time, Daktronics and Omega. It did.
The NEAC received a permit to try the light system at its 2017 championship meet, where it received overwhelmingly positive response not only from the deaf swimmers, but athletes from other schools and officials, too.
On June 13, the NCAA approved the use of lights or a lighting system to start races involving swimmers who are deaf and hard of hearing. Gallaudet’s two-year effort to change the status quo succeeded.
“Really, I never dreamed that I would have a video that went viral, that my picture would be out there and I would be known for something like this, especially me as somebody who is involved in the deaf community,” Frez-Albrecht said. NOT DONE YET The lighting system will be available for all collegiate swimmers for the 2017-18 academic year. It’s a significant step to make the sport accessible for all, but Curran is not satisfied because the technology is permitted, but not required.
“We feel that it’s necessary to make it mandatory for it to really get widespread use,” he said. “It is not a system in which you make special procedures for somebody for a disability to participate. It’s an accessible system (that) can be participated in by those with disability with no modifications. ... It’s an improvement in the starting system for hearing individuals, too.”
Santino and Curran would love to see it replace or at least accompany the whistles, audio commands and starting signal at all levels of swimming .
“Rules that make things more likely that the race will be fair for all in the race, I’m all about that,” said David Marsh, the 2016 U.S. Olympic head women’s coach and current coach at UC-San Diego. “I support that 100%. ... Light is another dimension that you can go off of, and certainly it’s the fastest way to do it outside of maybe anticipation.”
Swimmers have always looked for an edge, anything to shave a hundredth of a second off their time. Improving reaction times, using better touch pad technology, optimizing the number of strokes per lap — even those fast suits that are now banned — stem from the idea that this is a sport that encourages the pursuit of perfection, and every millisecond counts.
“Swimming has been a march through technology since it started,” Curran said. “They yelled, ‘Go!’ for years. Then, somebody started shooting a gun. Then, I guess it was about the ’70s or ’80s they started using a horn, and you could hear the beep. …
“One of the things that’s very obvious when you start looking at using this system compared to normal oral commands is that, when you use the starting horn, everybody goes off, you can tell there’s a difference in timing. When they go from the lights, everybody hits the water at the same time. It’s a far better starting system.”