A Former D1 Commit, Taylor Winnett Is Leaving Nothing To Chance In Her Second Act As A Swimmer

Taylor Winnett likes numbers.

Specifically, she likes numbers that tell her something about times. Qualifying times. The times of her competitors. Medal times. Her times.

So last year, before the Parapan American Games, Winnett started looking at the numbers and where she fell and realized that she had the potential to medal in multiple Para swimming events in Santiago, Chile.

“I decided to make a goal sheet, and I put what my goal time was and why, what I’d have to do in each event, and also the medal I thought I could win or wanted to win,” said Winnett, who is from Hershey, Pennsylvania. “I printed it out and laminated it and brought it to practice every day, and when I got unmotivated I’d look at it and read it.”

The 24-year-old Winnett left the Parapan American Games as the most decorated swimmer on Team USA, winning seven medals, including three gold. She now has a new laminated goal sheet — one that includes images of her teammates and family, the symbol for the 2024 Paralympic Games and the Paralympic gold medal that will be given out to this summer’s winners in Paris — that she uses for motivation as she tries to make her first Paralympic team.

Swimming has been a part of Winnett’s life since she was 4. Her mother was a swim coach, and her older sister was a swimmer who once roomed with Katie Ledecky, Winnett said.

“I’ll tell anyone who listens that my older sister is a better athlete and smarter than me,” she said.

Winnett herself was a Div. I prospect who’d committed to swim at Loyola University Maryland before the summer leading into her senior year. Then a series of minor accidents snowballed into something much bigger. First, that August she flipped over on a jet ski and herniated two discs in her spine. Then, in October, she fell during calculus class and suffered a fractured vertebrae and a Tarlov cyst at the base of her spine.

In tremendous pain with her mobility compromised, Winnett was also diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a rare condition that impacts everyone differently but is characterized by loose joints, joint pain and hypermobility. She decommitted from Loyola, believing that her competitive swimming career was over. From a Div. I recruit, she said, she became someone who spent her days on the couch, gaining weight and sinking into depression.

It was her physical therapist at Johns Hopkins who suggested she start swimming again.

“She said, ‘You talk about swimming a lot, I can tell you like it, why don’t you try again?’” Winnett said. “And I was like, ‘I’m scared, it hurts, blah blah blah.’ She said, ‘I think you should try.’”

So she did, at Loyola, where she was enrolled as a student studying biology and psychology. One day at the pool she ran into the swim coach who’d recruited her. He not only remembered her, but also suggested she get involved in Para swimming.

“I was like, what is that?” she said. “That’s something I think is really sad, that I swam competitively for 13 years and didn’t realize the Paralympics existed.”

Winnett got her classification in 2019 at the Bill Keating Cincinnati Para Swimming Open. Although still scared, she was encouraged by then-national team director Queenie Nichols, who told her she had a lot of potential but needed to try harder. She learned a standing start, and a few months later at a meet in New York made the emerging time cut in the 50-meter freestyle.

“I touched the wall and started bawling my eyes out,” Winnett said. “That’s when I thought I had a chance at getting better at this.”

Winnett continued to train and compete, got married, graduated from college, and got a job teaching children coping skills for mental health issues. She loved the work. But when her job wouldn’t give her the two days off she needed to get internationally classified at a meet in Indianapolis, she made a decision.

“I talked to my husband and I was crying, like, should I quit my job to swim? I don’t know what to do,” she said. “He said, ‘Do what you think is best.’ I said, ‘I guess I’m quitting my job.’”

Winnett has spent the better part of the last year at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, preparing for this summer’s Paralympic trials. She’s been away from her husband, who is a combat engineer in the U.S. Army, which hasn’t been easy despite the close bonds she’s formed with her teammates. She isn’t sure what the future will hold for her competitive swimming career after this summer, because they hope to soon start a family.

So for the next few months, she’ll focus on making sure she has no regrets.

“I don’t want to get on the blocks at trials or, if I make the team, in Paris and think, ‘I should have done this, or should have done that,’” she said.

Acquiring her disability as a teenager taught her some hard lessons, Winnett said, but today she embraces all she’s learned and the person she’s become because of her disability. She now sees that while it can be scary and painful, disability can also be beautiful and wonderful.

“It brought me to this sport,” she said. “I started swimming at 4 years old. I love to swim. And one day when I retire I hope people will see a young girl who fell in love with swimming and a disabled woman who didn’t give up.”

Karen Price is a reporter from Pittsburgh who has covered Olympic and Paralympic sports for various publications. She is a freelance contributor to USParaSwimming.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.