Two USMS Members Named to Masters International Swimming Hall of Fame’s 2023 Class

Lone Star Masters member Tom Wolf and Brian Lee Ohana Club member Nadine Day were named to the Masters International Swimming Hall of Fame’s 2023 class.

The two USMS members were among the seven athletes representing five countries to gain this prestigious honor that recognizes significant achievement in swimming, diving, water polo, artistic swimming, and dry-side contributions to aquatics sports. They’ll be inducted in October in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Tom Wolf

When Wolf received the email indicating he was to be inducted because of his swimming accomplishments, he initially thought it was a prank. “It came out of the blue. There was no head’s-up,” says the 69-year-old backstroke specialist.

But if you consider his lengthy history as a superlative swimmer at all levels of competition, his selection makes perfect sense.

Wolf began competing as a Masters swimmer in 1983, and since then, he’s set 28 World Aquatics world Masters records and placed in the Top 10 16 times. Although Wolf has not yet competed in any World Aquatics Masters World Championships, he has nevertheless accumulated 949 world points by breaking world records and setting world rankings.

Once a Swimmer, Always a Swimmer

Wolf grew up swimming and says he started competing at the tender age of 4. He continued swimming all through high school and competed for Harvard University in the 1970s. He competed at the Olympic Trials in 1976, finishing 17th in the 200 backstroke with a 2:08.42.

“It was brutal being a backstroker that year,” he says, as he was up against John Naber, Dan Harrigan, and Peter Rocca, the three Americans who swept the men’s 200 backstroke at the Olympics.

After graduating from Harvard with a degree in economics, Wolf assumed his swimming days were over and took about six years off from the pool. But in 1983, he found his way to Masters swimming, and he’s been in and out of the pool and posting speedy times ever since.

Family and work demands meant Wolf hasn’t always been able to swim as much or as often as he wants. He and his wife have six children, and “back in the ’90s when my boys were young, I tried to keep doing it. I got a few years in the mid- to late-’90s,” before he took some time away as life intervened.

In 2004, Wolf returned and had a “big year” before his “body started protesting. I started getting a series of injuries that kept me sidelined for a while.” In 2019, he again staged a comeback, only to be thwarted by the COVID-19 pandemic. “That was a big setback,” he says.

But since retiring from a career in technology sales in 2021, Wolf has been able to prioritize swimming in a whole new way. “I’m trying to make a huge push to get back to the kind of swimming I used to do back in the 1980s. Those were my most productive Masters years,” he says.

Pulling Together

To achieve that aim, Wolf trains hard and has surrounded himself with several other Texas-based 65-plus-year-old backstroke swimmers who are pushing him to new heights. They call themselves the “Medicare Back Pack” in an effort to keep things fun.

But when it comes to high-performance swimming, Wolf and his crew are all business. “If everything works out, this year should be my biggest Masters year event because I’m aging up to the 70-74 age group,” he says.

It’s not just about individual goals, either, he says. “I want to try to get all the backstroke world records, but there are 8 or 10 of us on our team that range from 68 to 71, so we’re trying to get as many of the 280-plus relay world records as we can. So far, we have 16 out of 30. We’re having a blast.”

That camaraderie has made all the difference, Wolf says. “If you can get in with the right group, it’s just a blast to push each other. I’ve never been able to really swim on my own. It’s just great to have good coaching on deck and a great workout group. It’s just a lot easier to train hard and learn new things” when you’re working together.

Wolf credits his teammates with pushing him hard, but he also says a new weight training program has helped. “I’ve never had a coached weight program before, so I’m doing that for the first time in my life. I started that last April and having somebody else design the program for me instead of me just trying to do it at my house on my own” has helped. He usually works with that trainer for an hour twice per week.

Wolf typically swims four times per week for an hour and 15 minutes per session with Texas Ford Aquatics, which he says “is just a great environment.”

Wolf is excited for what lies ahead for him in Masters swimming.

“We keep remarking to ourselves at practice and after we watch our races that we still have so much to learn and so much to change about our swimming,” he says. “It’s like we’re just starting things.”

Nadine Day

Day, a long-time volunteer, is being enshrined for her volunteer contributions to Masters swimming and other Masters aquatic disciplines around the world.

Day grew up swimming in Hawaii and racked up early successes, notching three junior national championship wins and making the U.S. National Team in the mid-1980s. In 1988, she finished 18th in the 200 IM at Olympic Trials. She earned a swimming scholarship to Northwestern University, but her college career was cut short by injury. She took some time away from swimming, but had been coaching a high school team when she learned about Masters swimming in 2001.

Almost as soon as she joined, Day was asked by members of the Illinois LMSC to become sanctions chair. From there, she began attending USMS’s annual meeting and joined additional national-level committees, taking on task after task whenever she was asked.

In 2005, Day was elected to USMS’s Board of Directors and served two terms as Great Lakes director. She then served four years as vice president of community services and was elected president of USMS in 2012 and served two terms, overseeing an era of rapid growth and professionalization of the organization as the National Office expanded and developed as a business entity.

A key improvement Day spearheaded during her tenure as president was developing job descriptions for the various volunteer positions; prior to becoming president, responsibilities for many of the upper-level volunteer roles weren’t clearly defined, which can make transitioning to new leadership much more challenging. “I feel that it’s very important that if we expect people to do a job, they need to know what they’re responsible for. We can’t make assumptions,” she says.

Getting that information out of people’s heads and onto paper has helped USMS grow and become a more organized entity that can deliver a higher level of quality in services to and interactions with members.

Service and Gratitude

Across all of these intensive volunteer roles, Day says, “it wasn’t me wanting to do it. It was more than a privilege. People asked me to do it. And when people ask for help, I say ‘yes.’”

She says she feels blessed and grateful that she’s been provided with so many opportunities to serve, but she hastens to add she couldn’t have done it without the support of her husband—with whom she owns a small physical therapy practice in Danville, Illinois—and her family who have always supported her efforts. Her volunteer work often requires international travel and long stints away from work and home.

“When I’m gone, my husband has to do double duty, working 10- to 12-hour days and raising a daughter,” she says. Day helps out with what she can remotely during these trips, but says she’s “very lucky and blessed” that she has the kind of support necessary to make herself available to volunteer.

Day wants to make sure that other volunteers who forgo precious vacation hours they’d otherwise spend with family to give back to the sport we all love get recognized for their efforts too. “It’s commendable for them to do that. It’s a lot of sacrifice,” she says.

And she wants to ensure that others have the opportunity to give back too: “Everybody needs opportunities. I was given opportunities, and we need to provide them for others.”

To that end, in her current roles as chairperson of the World Aquatic Masters Committee and a member of the Pan Am Aquatics Masters Technical Committee, she’s looking to support other Masters swimming federations around the world that aren’t as far along the development path as USMS is.

“My vision it to help a lot of the federations that aren’t as fortunate as USMS,” she says. “They don’t have a voice, so I’m trying to support and be the voice of those people now.”

Making Opportunity More Accessible

Day’s own swimming generally comes second to her volunteering, but she still competes as often as she can, despite developing a health issue that’s had major repercussions for her swimming; while flying home from the meeting where she was elected president of USMS, Day experienced severe vertigo and soon discovered that she had developed a problem with her vestibular cochlear nerve.

Damage to the nerve, possibly caused by a virus, led to deafness in her left ear and difficulty with dizziness and balance, particularly if she’s over-tired. That’s made it challenging for her to engage as much as she would like with her beloved open water swimming and has made starts and flip-turns in the pool untenable. Undeterred, Day says she can still follow the black line and not get lost in space. “You overcome things, but it changed my swimming a lot,” she says.

Still she knows that competition is the lifeblood of the swimming experience, even if it’s not against others. It can be a great motivator for staying fit and enjoying the water. That’s why increasing competitive opportunities at home and abroad is also a top priority for Day. She recognizes that traveling to world championships can be difficult for Masters athletes who have families and jobs and may not have the money necessary to fly off to far-flung destinations. “I’m trying to see what we can do to make it a little bit friendlier and more accessible,” she says.

Day urges others to get involved in any of the Masters aquatics disciplines and notes that “you don’t have to have been a swimmer as youngster to enjoy Masters swimming.”

She gives the example of people she met recently in Doha, Qatar, and Japan at recent world championship events who were gymnasts when they were younger who’ve adopted diving and artistic swimming. “Their bodies can’t do gymnastics anymore,” she says, but they can dive and swim, and that provides a vital competitive outlet for them. “I think it’s really great they found that and love it. You don’t have to come from an aquatics background to enjoy Masters.”

Day recently founded and joined the Brian Lee Ohana Club, which is named for her age group coach who has kidney cancer. She hopes to round up several swimmers from their age group team to compete in various meets in honor of the coach who first gave them a love for the sport. “If he didn’t push me and believe in me, I wouldn’t be where I am,” Day says.

To be sure, Day is convinced she’d be serving in some other capacity if she weren’t involved in Masters aquatics.

“God made me a servant leader,” she says, noting that she volunteers for other non-swimming causes too. “But combining my passion for swimming with volunteering, I’m very lucky that I’ve had these opportunities.”