Had she had her teammates cheering her on, she might well have done better at last week’s state girls swimming meet, Cami Hatch said during a conversation at The Star last week. She would make sure, she said, to take some of them with her next time.
Not that Hatch, the last East Hampton student-athlete to be competing in the fall, did poorly: She swam close to her best time in the 100-yard freestyle, and, despite one of her feet slipping on the pool wall at the start of the backstroke, did creditably in that event. The mishap, she agreed, would give her “something to shoot for.”
Her 34th-place finish in the backstroke had been disappointing, “but she handled it well,” her coach, Craig Brierley, said, “showing a level of mental toughness and maturity beyond her years.”
Throughout her young career, Hatch has won races in all the strokes, and has continued to improve. The East Hampton High junior began swimming with the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter’s youth swim team, the Hurricanes, as a 9-year-old, has swum with the varsity since eighth grade, and is a lifeguard. Nor does she — or Brierley — think she’s reached a plateau.
“You have good days and bad, but I’ve never had a span of months when I wasn’t dropping times. Seeing your training produce better results pushes you to do better. . . . I like it when I’m improving — it’s the greatest feeling.”
Perhaps, she added, her love of math and science fed into her affection for a sport in which progress was verifiable. Her equanimity, she added, could be traced to her parents, Chris and Lauren. “Both of them let things go — they’ve taught me this. If I don’t do as well as I’ve wanted, I tell myself I’ll do better next time.”
As for Hatch’s experience at the state meet, the first such that she’d qualified for, Brierley said of his team’s M.V.P., “She gets it — she works hard, but she understands that you have to accept the highs and the lows. It’s part of a brutal sport — you’re always fighting against the stopwatch.”
And, as Brierley can also attest, she’s largely been winning. In the recent county meet, she topped 15 others who had better seedings in finishing fourth in the 100 free, in 54.05 seconds — bettering her previous-best in that event by almost four seconds — and was the runner-up in the 100 back, in 58.95, topping four others who had better seeding times.
In league meets this fall, she was a winner in relays and in half a dozen individual events. The only one she didn’t do, she said, was the 500 freestyle. Not that she couldn’t, but she was, Hatch explained with a smile, “not very good at maintaining a pace — I like to go all out.”
Hatch comes from an athletic family — her father ran track and played soccer when he was a student here, her aunt Paula is in the school’s Hall of Fame as an individual inductee and as a member of the 1989 field hockey team, and her mother, she said, had always exercised.
“It was nice growing up,” she said. “We’d go down to Indian Wells all the time — it was five minutes from our house. It was always the ocean, not the bays. . . . No, I never had a fear of the water.”
Proximity to the ocean would, she added, play a part in which college she chooses to go to — the University of North Carolina Wilmington, which she’ll visit over the Christmas vacation, being high on her list. She said she’d like to swim in college, but hastened to add that she didn’t want it to be her life.
The backstroke remains her favorite. The breaststroke, she agreed, was “one of the hardest,” perhaps because “you’re moving so slow, but you want to be fast!”
She will continue swimming this winter, with the Y’s Hurricane youth team that’s coached by Tom Cohill and Angelika Cruz.
Asked if she’d ever surfed, the interviewee smiled and said, “Yes, two years ago a friend’s mom, who’s very good, began teaching me. We’ll go to Ditch Plains. I know I’ve got off to a late start, but I like being out there, even if I’m not standing up.”
“You’ve fallen?”
“A lot!”
But that, she agreed, was how you learned.
