Olympic swimmer and Texas junior Erin Gemmell learned how to swim before she learned how to walk.
When she was growing up, Gemmell followed her father, longtime swim coach Bruce Gemmell, around on the pool deck. To ensure she didn’t slip into the water and drown, Gemmell was already a skilled swimmer by four, beginning competitive swimming the same year.
Her family told her that she could choose whatever path she wanted. She could have been a soccer player or a ballerina dancing on the stage. But for Gemmell, whose family was in the world of swimming, the decision was easy.
“I knew that my dad and my brother knew the world and I could see where the future went,” Gemmell said. “That probably came before I discovered the love of the sport.”
Her older brother, Andrew Gemmell, competed in the Olympics himself and pushed her to work harder to compete.
“I always joke that I’m trying to outdo him,” Gemmell said.
From competing against her brother to competing against international athletes, Gemmell developed a command of the pool that has positioned her among collegiate swimming’s rising stars. As she kicks off another season with the University of Texas, Gemmell balances early-morning practices and a full-time academic workload.
“Sometimes you have to do stuff that you don’t want to do for the sake of the team,” Gemmell said. “Maybe it’s swim an event you don’t want to swim or … maybe you don’t want to go to team dinner, but you have to go because that’s you putting in the work to bond with your teammates.”
On two-practice days, Gemmell grabs breakfast after a 5:05 a.m. swim. She does homework, goes to class, then heads back to the pool to swim for the second time that day.
“If I’m lucky, I get to go home and relax,” Gemmel said. “If I’m not, I get to go home and do homework.”
And for the most part, that schedule has worked for her. As a Plan II Honors major, Gemmell worked through a heavy workload with a disciplined approach to time management and ended up winning the V.F. “Doc” Neuhaus Award, given to the female athlete with the highest GPA.
“Whenever you have downtime, no matter how many, if it’s 15 minutes, you have to be willing to use that time to get your work done,” Gemmell said.
Despite her busy schedule, Gemmell remains grounded, focusing not only on medals but on personal growth.
In last year’s national championships, Gemmell crushed her two freestyle relay events only to underperform in the 500-yard free that same day. She was still able to turn it around the next day to make finals in the 200-yard freestyle, but assistant coach Chad Mylin said that wouldn’t have always been the case.
“Her freshman year, she would have had a hard time turning that around,” Mylin said. “But going from the Olympics to last season helped with that. Having even more international experience and two NCAAs under her belt, she can use those experiences to keep the self-talk up.”
What Gemmell took from the Olympics was more than just international experience; it was a new way of focusing her energy in the pool, a skill she’s now able to implement at Texas.
“A lot of it was just confidence-based,” she said. “You have to learn to have confidence in yourself, and it can be really hard when you’re training for something like that to maintain confidence. You just have to fake it till you make it.”
