Deaf swimmer shines light on technology that could change future of the sport

WASHINGTON — 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 the backstroke.

Frez-Albrecht is deaf and legally blind. For the past 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 athletes who are deaf and hard of hearing face in swim meets. 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 competing in college, but Frez-Albrecht ultimately may 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 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 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 both 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 this 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 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 — both for Frez-Albrecht and the team.

There were multiple factors, starting with the murkiness of the water and the pool’s filtration system. For a deaf athlete with vision problems, it’s a disadvantage.

“She was unable to navigate properly,” Curran said. “So what we did was we got broomsticks and put a tennis ball on the end, and then she would go swimming down the pool as fast as she could go, and we were tapping her to keep her in a straight line, and then when she would get to the wall, going as fast as she could to the wall, and she couldn’t see, she relied on someone to tap her on the shoulder and so she could do a racing turn and go back. That takes a lot of guts.”

Using this makeshift technique, Frez-Albrecht swam in a relay event. Then, during a 10-minute break, she and Curran discussed ways she could make her turns and stay safe in the murky water for individual events. Her 400 IM — the most grueling event in all of swimming — was up next.

“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.

“Faye recognizes no limits,” Curran said. “There aren’t any, as far as she’s concerned.”

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 for every college swimmer.

HOW THIS 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 the 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 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 also 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. “I just didn’t expect that. I wasn’t planning for it. It just happened.”

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 can be participated in by those with disability with no modifications... It’s an improvement in the starting system for hearing individuals, too.”

Reaction Light Systems have received permission to be used to start events sanctioned by the National Federation of State High School Associations, the YMCA and USA Swimming. Santino said this week he is in the process of shipping RLS technology to Turkey for the Deaflympics later this month.

Perhaps it won’t stop there. Santino and Curran would love to see it replace or at least accompany the whistles, audio commands and current 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%. This will help that. Every athlete, every person, has different things they react to, different stimuli. There are people who can react to a sound faster than another person. 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 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 — all of that stems 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. … They used to do analog, and then they went to electronic judging and timing systems. That has progressed, and it is very sophisticated at this point. This, in my opinion, is simply another addition, another development in technology, that’s going to improve it for everybody.

“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.”