Just a few years after she learned how to walk, Christiana Williams was tumbling her way through Tucson’s gymnastics circuit, completing aerials and walkovers with ease.
She spent eight years hitting the mats, balance beams and uneven bars before she could no longer ignore that which would eventually be her downfall in the sport: her height.
“At the time I quit, I was probably 5-6 and that was way too tall,” Williams, 18, said, adding that by 10 years old, she was already taller than all of her male coaches.
The thing that she loved the most eventually came to become the thing that also tormented her on the regular.
“Every day was like me fighting against the most basic form of my body to try to do the sport that I loved,” said Williams, who is now 5-11. “It got to the point that I realized this can’t be good mentally or physically.”
While it was tough leaving gymnastics behind, Williams did so with the knowledge that she was an athlete and would eventually find her sport.
With the odds stacked against her the last time around, Williams decided to embrace her stature and look for a sport where being tall would work to her benefit.
She tried volleyball for a year, but ...
“I was not a fan of it,” Williams said. “Then my dad forced me to try summer swimming with the city of Tucson league, and all I could think was, ‘How dare you force me to do this.’”
But Dad was right, and a week or so in, she was hooked. The high point of the season, according to Williams, was the end-of-summer meet, which is when she realized she was great in the pool.
Williams, a USA Swimming Scholastic All-American, returned to the pool at the end of May.
Doubling down
Williams decided to go all in, signing up for year-round swim at Tucson Ford Aquatics Center when she was 12.
“That’s when I realized ‘Oh, I’m actually horrible at this. I was just in something very different,’” Williams said with a laugh. “Summer swim is a totally different sport. It’s a great start and you can have a lot of fun, but it’s not competitive swimming in the way that USA Swimming is.”
Williams said she was “easily the slowest person” in her group at Ford, which made for an interesting experience.
“Everyone hated me. Not out of spite or meanness, but simply because I should not really have been in that group,” she said. “But it was the right group for my age and coach knew that I was athletic from previous things.”
During her first year with Ford, Williams was also participating in choir and missed a lot of swim practices, which didn’t help. But she still got better, and after that year she knew she wanted to give swimming her all.
Williams saw an immediate improvement in her times the following season and said that the five years since have been crazy — but not in a bad way.
“A lot of people in swimming have been swimming since they were 4 or 5 years old, so for the first few years, I was way behind,” Williams said. “I doubled down and got to be where I am now.”
Where she is now is headed off to Tulane University in New Orleans in the fall, having earned a spot on the Green Wave’s Division I team.
She broke a few records during her time on Catalina Foothills High School’s team: During her junior year, she set the school’s 100-meter breaststroke mark, but her celebration was short. The next day, a friend and teammate beat her by 0.01 seconds.
The next year, Williams set her mind to taking back that record and beat the old one by a solid two seconds, beating it again two more times during her senior season with a final time of 1:03:09.
She was also part of the team that broke the school’s 200-meter medley relay.
During the 2018-19 NCSA Spring Championship, Williams made best times in the 50-, 100- and 200-meter breaststroke events. She was hoping to make a return this spring, but coronavirus got in the way.
Embracing opportunity
The break from competition didn’t mean Williams took a break from swimming: She was working out seven days a week, sometimes twice a day.
“It was kind of an opportunity because nobody was in the pool because they’re all closed,” she said. “So you can either take the time to not do anything, and hypothetically there are other people who are doing that, or you can try to push yourself.”
Williams chose the latter, embracing her weaknesses and exercising the only way she could.
“I’m a horrible runner. I have asthma and my knees are not great, but I convinced myself I needed to do this 5½-mile run every day.”
It was a rough start, and Williams was settled into her new routine for about a month before the pools opened.
Williams was able to return to practice at the end of May, but the amount of time she’s been able to practice is limited, due to safety guidelines put into place.
“It’s good and bad. Swimming is so much harder to come back to from time off,” Williams said. “Your body is not built to exist in water.”
Williams acknowledges that the time off and the missed competitions were tough, but says she prefers not to look at it as being disappointed.
“I’m normally not this rational, but somehow I’ve managed to work it out in my mind as I can be upset and be in this situation or be fine with it and be in this situation,” she said.
And so, like many of her peers, she’s looking to the future. To Tulane.
Christiana Williams started out in gymnastics, spending eight years in the sport before realizing she was too tall. She moved over to swimming, where she quickly excelled, and will be joining Tulane University’s swim team.
Riding the Green Wave
She’s excited to swim under Tulane Coach Leah Stancil and she’s looking forward to her studies, which will focus on neuroscience and exercise science.
“I definitely want to go to medical school,” Williams said. “I think at this point that I’d like to be an orthopedic surgeon with an emphasis on sports medicine, but I’m very aware of the fact that I’m 18 and we’re talking about eight years from now, and there are a lot of options between now and then.”
Under the current plan, Williams is set to leave Aug. 4, with Green Wave swimmers scheduled for coronavirus testing on Aug. 5-6, before they move into the dorms.
As life is gradually getting back to normal, there are a still a few things Williams would like to do before she leaves town, including spending time with her non-swim friends, who she hasn’t seen since March, due to her self-described “subpar immune system.”
But with her mother working as an emergency room doctor, Williams has had a front-row seat to the effects of coronavirus on one part of the health-care system.
“When coronavirus first hit, everybody who didn’t have that or symptoms were terrified to go to the ER,” she said. “It was obscenely slow, almost the opposite of what you would expect. My mom was coming home from work on time, which doesn’t usually happen, and would finish her charts in a short amount of time.”
That all changed a few weeks ago, but Williams was grateful to have the extra time with her mom so close to her departure.
She’s looking forward to charting her own course in the Big Easy, and expanding upon the ever-growing cast of characters she’s been introduced to through swimming.
And perhaps more than anything, Williams is ready to compete again. To put all of that hard work she put in back in February and March to good use.
“It’s not like that work just disappears and will never be seen again,” Williams said. “It will probably lead to improvement in the future. You’ve just got to look at it that way.”
