“A couple of seconds is like a lifetime,” Jane Brierley said the other day about the breaststroke, her strongest event and the one she recently parlayed into a state championship in Rochester, becoming the first swimmer from East Hampton High School, male or female, ever to have achieved that feat.
So, how did it feel? she was asked.
“How did it feel? Honestly, when I touched the finish pad I had to look up at the board to see who won. There were three of us ahead of the pack who were neck and neck the whole way. My legs — you use them a lot in the breaststroke — felt like they’d fallen off. I could hardly walk up to the podium.”
“I’m always exhausted after races, though I didn’t care about the pain. I was really happy. . . . It comes down to who can stick it out in the last couple of yards. All three of us were tight. Swimming’s like that. It comes down to hundredths of a second.”
Seeded second, by a fraction of a second, after the preliminaries, the East Hampton High School senior said she was “very focused” in the finals the day after the preliminary heats. “There were 10 of us. I was jumping around a lot and stretching behind the blocks, but mentally I was locked in, calm, relaxed . . . I was telling myself, ‘Quick, quick, quick, I can beat this girl.’ “
And she did, out-touching Pearl River’s Mary Grace Guzzino, the top seed, in 1 minute and 3.75 seconds.
East Hampton’s coach, Craig Brierley (no relation) “doesn’t put a lot of pressure on us,” she said. “Obviously, he wants us to win, but he doesn’t use the word ‘winning’ with us. He wants us to focus on ourselves, on improving.”
Asked if she remembered the first time she swam, she said she could not, though it was at an early age. Her parents, Donald and Susan Brierley, have the photos of her in the family pool to prove it. “I was obsessed, I’d even go in when it was freezing”
She began swimming competitively, with the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter’s youth swim team, the Hurricanes, when she was 10, and still does, though last year Brierley forwent the varsity season. “I was extremely overwhelmed trying to get into college, I was swimming on two teams six days a week, working out on my own, running three miles a day, my grades were dropping . . . it was way too much.”
“You made the right decision.”
“When I committed to U.N.C.-Asheville in June, that took some of the pressure off. It was a relief. Though I’m a driven person, I still put a lot of pressure on myself . . . because I want to do my best.”
She begins her day at 4:30 a.m., lifting weights and stationary biking in the basement.
“Weight training’s very useful, and I run a lot, three miles a day.” And then, of course, there are the varsity and the Hurricane practices.
As a very young Hurricane, she swam the backstroke initially, “but then, when I tried the breaststroke, I realized that it was my thing. . . . You have to be coordinated to do it. What’s the secret. . . ? I don’t know. There’s a certain rhythm . . . pull-kick, pull-kick. Most people don’t like that rhythm, the kicking is a little awkward. As I said, it takes a lot of coordination. You have to be born to it. I guess, you either take to it or you don’t,” she said with a smile.
As a member of the high school’s varsity and of the state-champion Hurricanes team — she is also the Y state champion in the breaststroke — Brierley swims year round. The Y nationals are in Greensboro, N.C., in March, “but then come the spring and summer seasons.” Also during the summer she’s a lifeguard at Atlantic Avenue Beach in Amagansett.
As for awards, Brierley is pretty much all-everything — all-league, all-county, all-Long Island, and all-state (as was her teammate, Cami Hatch, in the backstroke) — and reportedly is up for consideration as a high school all-American.
When her interviewer recalled that swimming made him feel limber, she laughed and said, “It makes me very sore. But I like being sore because, hopefully, it means I’m making progress.”
