Big success in the pool

Published 12:01 am Tuesday, February 15, 2011

EVERETT — Haley Beranbaum might be a little person, but she still has big dreams and a big desire to succeed.

The 3-foot-7 Snohomish girl willingly reaches for tall goals, including those so ambitious they might seem beyond her. She has, said Ben Olszewski, her coach with the StingRay S

wim Club of Everett, “a champion’s spirit of trying to achieve her potential.”

Beranbaum, a 14-year-old freshman at Glacier Peak High School, was born with achondroplasia, a genetic aberration that results in dwarfism. Due to a gene mutation, people with achondroplasia are left wi

th very short arms and legs. The average height for a woman with this condition is around 4 feet, and for men a few inches taller.

Yet Beranbaum is, in many ways, a well-rounded, well-adjusted and very typical teenager. She is an outstanding student who hopes to study and then make a career in oceanography. She loves snowboarding and losing herself in a good book. She is an accomplished public speaker. And as a younger girl she performed in community theater.

The one activity that eluded her, or at least seemed to offer little opportunity for triumph, was sports.

Until now.

Beranbaum took up swimming in the fall of 2009, and has already achieved much more than anyone — her parents, her coach and perhaps even herself — ever thought possible. In the past two months she has established three USA Paralympics swimming records for athletes with her level of disability.

Competing in the S5 class, which is for swimmers who have full use of their arms and hands, but little use of their trunk or leg muscles and some degree of coordination difficulty, Beranbaum set national marks in the 200-yard freestyle (4:06.79) and the 50 breaststroke (1:01.28) in January at a meet at Mukilteo’s Kamiak High School.

Earlier this month she added another record in the 200 breaststroke (4:36.43) at a meet in Anacortes.

Putting her name in the record book — not just once, but three times — “definitely surprised me,” Beranbaum said with smile. “I thought maybe I could make one (someday), but definitely not (three) in a year and a half.”

The day she set her first two marks, “I was jumping up and down,” she said. “It was awesome.”

When Beranbaum began with the StingRay Swim Club in 2009, she was little more than a novice. She could splash around like other recreational swimmers, but was a long way from being competitive.

“You could see she had natural strength and ability,” Olszewski said of those early days. “But in no way, shape or form did she have the fundamentals down. So we started working to give her a fundamental base and she took to it really quickly. And by the six-month mark she was moving through the water and looking really good doing it.”

She was, he added, “a real student of the sport right from the beginning. And she was continually pushing me for more and more. I had a hard time holding her back. And in fact, I didn’t hold her back.”

Beranbaum started swimming mostly “as a way to get good physical exercise,” said her father Michael Beranbaum. “But we never thought she’d actually be competing with the team.”

Her success, he went on, “has brought out a side of her, the competitive side, that really wasn’t there before. And I think the success she’s realizing has (confirmed) what she’s been telling people all along, which is that she can accomplish anything like anybody else.”

At practices, Haley Beranbaum often lags in the water behind her able-bodied teammates, who are some of the elite swimmers at Snohomish County high schools. But one of the best parts of this story is the way her teammates — these are teenagers, remember — have not only accepted and encouraged her, but have embraced her as part of the squad.

“High school can be a tough time for every child, let alone somebody with a disability,” Michael Beranbaum said. “But the people on this team have been incredibly supportive of Haley. They connect with her and they bond with her, and they’ve been there for her all the way along.

“We’ve not seen any (insensitive or even cruel behavior), which has really been amazing to me,” he said.

“There have been no (negative) issues at all,” Olszewski confirmed. “She fits in well with all the kids. It’s been a great environment for Haley to be a part of.”

To help spread awareness about achondroplasia and dwarfism, Haley Beranbaum visits schools to talk about her condition and her life. And she’s getting very good at it, because she’s been doing it since she was in the first grade.

The message, she said, “is that little people are pretty much normal, except that we have shorter arms and legs. And I also want them to understand that just because we’re different doesn’t mean we can’t do everything. We just do it differently.”

“She gets a huge sense of satisfaction in trying to better not just her life, but also the life of anybody who has a disability,” Michael Beranbaum said. “It’s really a huge opportunity for her to educate the general public, and she’s not shy about doing it.”

The extraordinary thing about Haley, her father went on, is that she continues to show anew how extraordinary she is.

In her studies and in her future career, “I never thought she wouldn’t be successful,” he said. “But I just never expected it to be in sports. So it’s been incredible to see her flourish like this.

“She’s always had a (high) level of confidence, but I think swimming has really cemented that in her. It’s something else she can now show to people. She can say, ‘Look what I, as a little person, am able to accomplish.’”