I’m So Sick: How losing a coach in a disgusting way impacts my swimming

He hadn’t shown up to practice for three days. He’d been in contact, citing personal reasons for his sudden absence. Did he see it coming? Was he guilty? Maybe I’ll never know.

On Wednesday, Sept. 28 at 4:30 p.m., my swim team and I were questioning why Alex Morris hadn’t sent us a workout to complete. Even if he was gone for practice, he always sent a workout. Our assistant coach had to make it up as we went.

200 meters in, I wondered if it was a funeral. Maybe a sudden death in his family. He never just left without a word.

We didn’t know that he was arrested that morning after being accused of five counts of sexual exploitation of minors. I wouldn’t know until 8 that night when I collapsed in tears onto the library floor during our Harbinger deadline and had to be driven home by a friend before finishing my editorial.

Alex was my swim coach on and off for eight years on two different teams and became my head coach in 2021. Under his guidance, I dropped ten seconds off my 100 meter breaststroke time in only a year — not a common occurrence. He watched every one of my races at every one of my meets. I owe much of my swimming career to his coaching. His opinion was the only one I trusted when it came to swimming. He knew me like the back of his hand.

That fact makes me sick. So sick that I couldn’t swim for a week without stopping and crying. So sick that not even the crisis counselors my club team hired could help. So sick that when I realized a week later his contact was still in my phone, I fell into a chair in my living room like a rope from my core was pulling me down.

That night in the library was when the internal conflict hit me like a bat.

Did he ever look at me like he looked at those child pornography videos that were found on his iPad? When I joked with him, was he thinking about that video of the 8-year-old girl in a bathtub that he tried to bury in his Google Drive?

I’ll never know those answers either.

People don’t often think about the impact a coach has on their experience and performance in a sport — I know I didn’t until now. The moment that he was gone, I swam differently. For months on end I could barely drive myself to the pool every night, let alone dive in and work hard at something I so heavily associated with a man I used to see more than my own family.

It’s something that you don’t expect to mourn.

Sometimes I think about when the head coach of my club team, George, sat us all down on the bleachers to have an open discussion about the arrest. I can still see the guilt behind his eyes because he felt that he let us down. Later that practice, reporters waited outside of the pool to see if they could get an interview. George had get the pool staff to shoo them away from all the crying athletes.

I was frustrated with myself for allowing him to tarnish one of the most important outlets in my life, but I couldn’t let go of it. For two months, I considered quitting — the goals I made freshman year of finally swimming at state or placing at Missouri Valley champs didn’t matter to me anymore.

I needed to separate him from my sport. Everyone said so — from those crappy crisis counselors to my best friend — but that’s easier said than done. Only last week did my times drop again, after five months of crying after swim meets and getting beat by girls that I’d normally be miles ahead of.

I’m still not fully recovered — which sucks — but I don’t need to be OK yet, I just need to swim.