Lynchburg, Va. -- Claire Galloway loves swimming.

The University of Lynchburg women's swimming graduate student showed up to interview for this article with an iPad on her lap so she could keep an eye on the Swimming World Championships, being held in Doha, Qatar. She even received a text from a former teammate asking if she could share her log in so others can watch. She's an eight-time Old Dominion Athletic Conference champion. She's a five-time All-ODAC first-teamer. She holds two individual and two relay records at Lynchburg. For Galloway, it really is all about swimming.

But there wasn't always this much infatuation around the sport for her. She was scared of water when she was little. Terrified. She couldn't even take a shower, and bathtime for her parents was a nightmare. 

Mr. and Mrs. Galloway, a swimming couple and former lifeguards, had no choice but to get the professionals involved, and they signed their daughter up for swim lessons at four years old. She made a quick, almost miraculous adjustment to the pool, and by the age of five, was swimming alongside eight and nine year olds. And even though swimming laps at the pool was reserved for adults, one can picture the lifeguards just shrugging their shoulders as a young Galloway swam lap after lap with ease. 

Swimming once again became a little harder for Galloway when her father's career took them across the pond to the East Midlands, near Leicester, England and two hours south of London. 

"People really didn't swim there," Galloway said. "But I played soccer."

Once her family returned stateside a few years later and landed in North Carolina, it was back in the pool for Galloway. Unfortunately, she was already behind schedule to accomplish her dreams of being a college swimmer. She joined a summer league team in middle school, but all of her teammates had joined the club when they were six. She also couldn't train as frequently as she wanted until she got a driver's license and could bring herself to the pool.

The more she could practice, the more often she trained, the better Galloway got. She qualified for her first travel meet going into her junior year of high school which represented a big milestone for an aspiring swimmer. The travel meet gave Galloway just the right start to her junior season which is a crucial time for college recruiting. 

Then, injuries started popping up, and Galloway was out of the pool again, unable to fully dedicate herself to her passion. She was missing out on showcasing herself to coaches, and she watched as teammate after teammate earned spots on college swimming teams. Luckily, there were emails coming into her inbox from a school she had never heard of. 

"I don't know if I should say this, but I remember thinking Brad's emails were annoying."

Now the director of men's and women's swimming at Lynchburg, Bradley Dunn was just trying to get a group of kids together for the first year of his new swim program. But Galloway, and even her parents, had never heard of the school, or even Lynchburg as a city. She definitely couldn't place it on a map among the Blue Ridge Mountains before visiting campus as one of Coach Dunn's first recruits.

As a senior in high school, Galloway qualified for the National Club Swimming Association juniors meet. Coach Dunn was there to watch her swim her first 1:06.17 in the 100 breast. She got her coveted nationals cut in February, but it was so late in her senior year that most college rosters had been filled. 

It came down to Lynchburg, or Shippensburg, a Division-II school in Pennsylvania. Galloway ended up choosing Lynchburg for its Doctorate of Physical Therapy program…and at the time, she figured the new swim team would be a good stepping stone to a DI school later in her career. 

Galloway lives off campus now as she pursues her Doctorate of Physical Therapy at Lynchburg five years after arriving as a freshman. She just finished rearranging her room in her new house, and on the wall next to her mirror is her medal hanger complete with 22 ODAC awards.

Galloway has eight ODAC championship medals. She's earned two NCAA B-cuts, a rare standard to meet, especially as the first Lynchburg women's swimmer to have met the mark. But ask Galloway to tell you her favorite medal from the last five years, and she'll show you two unique ones: a silver medal from her freshman year and the gold medal she won with Lindsey Hair, Savy Borroughs, and Molly Spano in the 200-yard medley relay this year. 

"Relays mean more," Galloway said. "It's a team thing. It's not just you racing. It's more special having teammates racing with you." 

Galloway and the 200 medley set a school record at the championship meet in 2024 going 1:46.09. It's also the first time a Lynchburg relay has beaten Washington and Lee, the perennial champions of the Old Dominion Athletic Conference, in a relay. 

Back in 2020, Galloway finished second in the 100 breast. That's when she earned silver as a freshman and the program's first B-cut. She would go on to win the 100 breast for the next four seasons, but each year posed a significant and different challenge. 

First, in 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world. "It was just school and swim," Galloway remembered. In a way, it may have helped Galloway and her teammates. They considered themselves to be in the best shapes of their lives considering there were no distractions. They didn't have any other choice than to sit in their dorm room on their computer for class, then go swim. 

The "COVID championship," as Galloway dubbed it, culminated in a conference championship for the women's team. Washington and Lee and Randolph-Macon sat out the season for the global pandemic, but the joy was still real for Galloway and her teammates as she recalls former assistant coach Aaron Green playing "We Are The Champions" over the speakers while the team  jumped into the pool to celebrate.

The next season, her junior year, Galloway and her teammates received their championship rings from a season ago. It was a testament to their ability to persevere through a global pandemic and showed the massive improvements the team made despite being a second-year program. 

Things changed quickly after the ring ceremony for Galloway. 

Galloway was diagnosed with vestibular dysfunction and Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) shortly after getting her championship ring. It wasn't correlated to the big silver and red band around her finger, but the timing couldn't have been worse. 

"It's like the feeling of having a concussion all the time," Galloway tried to explain. "The fight or flight system in my body was constantly in fight."

Her heart rate would be over 200 after simple training sessions, and she struggled to catch her breath regularly. It didn't just affect her in the pool. She missed two months of school due to her condition as a junior as well. 

Maybe because of her competitive spirit, maybe just because of her love of swimming, but Galloway was still in the pool in February, and somehow, she was still on top of the podium. 

"I almost passed out," Galloway said, recalling the moment they put her second straight gold medal from the 100 breast over her head. Not because of the joy winning another gold, but because she had pushed herself to the limit. She credits her teammates for helping her push through as much of that junior year as she could but had to withdraw from the final day of competition. 

"There wasn't a question to swimming my senior year," Galloway said. Her body was done, but she wasn't.

Despite still battling her symptoms from POTS, Galloway was back up on the podium her senior year come February as the 100 breast champion. Other than the gold medal dangling from her neck, she knew things were on the right track again after getting under 1:05 for the first time since her freshman year. 

Galloway graduated from Lynchburg in 2023 but had to make a choice where she'd go to DPT school. Once again, it wasn't a question of if she'd swim or not. One of her graduate-student teammates, Colton Schnars, helped her make the decision to swim and pursue a doctorate. 

"School is easier with swimming," Schnars said. Schnars joined the Lynchburg swim team in August of 2022 as a transfer in the DPT program and earned the men's team's first B-cuts in the 100 and 200-yard backstroke. 

Galloway had already accomplished many of her goals before her fifth season of swim. All that was left was to beat W&L in a relay, win a fourth gold medal in the 100 breast, and qualify for the national championship meet. Lynchburg gave her the best chance at those goals while pursuing her DPT degree. 

Life as a graduate student helped her get her health under control, and she said she started feeling healthy for the first time in two years. Despite taking 17 credits and going to class from 8:45 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Galloway adjusted well to life after undergrad, especially as she set out to just enjoy her final year of swimming. 

At the championships in February, Galloway and the 200 medley relay beat W&L, won a fourth gold medal in the 100 breast while swimming a lifetime best and setting a school record, and earned her second career B-cut. As it stands in the middle of February, Galloway is ranked 12th nationally in the 100 breast with about 20 swimmers qualifying for the national championship at the end of March. She'll have to wait for a few more conference meet results to be posted before finding out if she'll be in Greensboro for the championship and check off her final goal. 

Regardless, Galloway will still be in Lynchburg for the next two years as she finishes out her physical therapy doctorate. She will always have her 22 medals, and she will always have the memories of doing her favorite thing in the world: swimming.

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--LYN--