Taylor Kohlmann’s lifelong race in the swimming pool began for a small, innocuous reason: in first grade, several of her friends hosted pool parties for their birthdays; she didn’t know how to swim, so her dad had to monitor her; and neither of them wanted that, so she started swim lessons.

“I like seeing how I’ve progressed [in swimming], just as myself through my own work, and not having to worry about how it measures up to others’,” she said. “A lot of the competitive aspect, at least for me, was pretty centered on how I could try to be better than at previous meets—that’s what ultimately determined whether a swim was good or bad. I really valued the focus that my coaches and I placed on self-improvement.”

But when Taylor was 14, swimming started to become painful. Doctors told her she has a degenerative disc in her back; degenerative spinal discs can inhibit movement and cause intense pain, which can eventually lessen as the body readjusts to accommodate the injury.

“[Sophomore year] a bunch of doctors told me to quit, but I didn’t want to. It was really painful and eventually, it was a struggle between being able to train enough to keep improving and not training so much that it would become uncontrollable. It was really painful and I think that’s part of why I got kind of burned out with swimming,” Taylor said. “I cut back on hours a lot; I used to sometimes train doubles during the school day, and I just couldn’t take that anymore––my back couldn’t handle it anymore. I would go to practice and then I would need a day for it to die down.”

The summer after her sophomore year, in 2016, Taylor did take a break from swimming, a decision made by her and her doctors to prevent further aggravation to her back and see if her condition would improve.

“That was the summer that I was able to go on the Japan trip and do new things, and I started working as a lifeguard, which I wouldn’t have done because I wouldn’t have had time because I would have been at the pool for six hours [a day],” she said. “[My injury] seemed like a bad thing, but maybe it wasn’t that bad.”

Since that summer, Taylor has since resumed swimming club and at the upper school, her injury still extant but less intense.

The summer of her swimming break, as part of a Harker-sponsored trip, Taylor travelled to Japan, where she stayed with a host family in Kawasaki, attended school with her host and went sightseeing. Taylor, is half-Japanese herself and has taken Japanese courses at Harker since middle school.

“My family has zero Japanese [language] left,” she said. “Because I’m fifth generation half-Japanese, it’s died out by now [and] we’re very American. I was interested in learning a little about the language and the culture because all the extended family is on my dad’s side because my mom is an only child too.”

The other half of Taylor’s family hails from Manitowoc, Wisconsin, a city of 30,000 that borders Lake Michigan; Taylor and her parents typically visit every year.

“Every time we go there, they [my family] find a very different strange thing for us to try doing. Growing up there would be so different from how I’ve grown up,” she said. “It’s a small town and I like being in the midwest.

“My uncle has a dairy farm. One time we went snowmobiling, and one time we drove four-wheelers. We play sheepshead; it’s a very confusing card game that people laugh at me [for] when I try to describe. It uses 32 cards, and you take out the 2s through the 6s in a normal deck of cards, and it’s this complex thing with partners and taking tricks and earning points, and it’s really confusing.”

Taylor enjoys spending time with her friends just as much as she does with her family and remains staunchly self-motivated, a believer in pursuing what interests her instead of following a sense of obligation or outside influence.

“If you surround yourself with the right people, things will go well,” she said. “I’ve lucked out with friends. You have to find the people who you don’t even know how you became friends with them. It just fits.”

And Taylor has found friends who “fit.”

“She’s that friend who will organize a poster making session for someone’s senior night, or she’s the one who goes all out for birthdays, getting balloons and a cake and everything,” Olivia Long (12) said.
Taylor’s care for her friends applies to all aspects of their lives.

“I woke up after a particularly rough day to find Taylor at my doorstep with four huge buckets of ice cream,” Taylor’s friend Katherine “Kate” Chow (12) said. “We had joked about doing that before but she actually followed through and that was amazing. She’s just the type of person who will go the extra mile to make sure you’re okay or that you feel better.”