MacEwen Swims Back to Nationals Three Years After Her Debut at 14

Dante can’t teach Shauna MacEwen anything about purgatory. She could write her own book about it after waiting three long years between her first appearance in the U. S. Senior National swim meet as a 14-year-old and her second, this summer as a 17-year-old.

MacEwen’s idea of the paradisio has long been a return to the national meet, and she finally fulfilled her quest by making a national cut July 14 at the Los Angeles Invitational with a time of 8 minutes, 54.32 seconds in the 800-meter freestyle.

MacEwen, who lives in Westlake Village, swam the 800-meter freestyle in the nationals Friday at the USC Olympic Pool and finished 14th, earning three points for her Thousand Oaks-based Daland United Swim Team.

“Getting here was the big deal,” MacEwen said. “Anything I did was icing on the cake.”

MacEwen swam an 8:57.24 and finished a strong third in her early afternoon heat. Janet Evans won the 800 with an 8:22.11 in the evening heat, which included the eight top-seeded swimmers entering the meet.

“I wanted to be top 16, so that kind of makes up for being a little off on time,” said MacEwen, whose time was a full second slower than the personal record she set at age 14. “It’s a lot of fun to be here, but it’s also stressful.”

MacEwen had begun to wonder if she would ever again compete in the senior nationals. When her swimming career went into limbo for three years, her spirits did the limbo, dropping down every time she failed to make a cut.

“I’ve seen 100 girls do great at 14 and never do it again,” said MacEwen, who will be a senior at Westlake High. “That was my big fear, that I had peaked at 14.

“The first time I didn’t make it, I cried. When I didn’t make it again, I cried but not as much. The third time I didn’t cry. I’d almost gotten used to not making it.”

As MacEwen grew older, her perspective on swimming changed, and it affected her performance in the pool for better and worse. Learning that there was life outside the lane dividers helped her deal with her disappointments, but she also lost the single-mindedness that drove her as a 14-year-old.

“She hasn’t put in the huge amount of work we did five or six years ago,” said Ingrid Daland, MacEwen’s coach. “When you’re 14, you’re full of enthusiasm. You have no social life. You just do it. . . . Then she got more into the high school scene, and all her friends are not into swimming, and it makes it really tough.”

MacEwen’s time in swimming purgatory was lengthened by the sin of forgetting how she had initially excelled.

“The summer after eighth grade was the best summer I’ve ever had in my life,” MacEwen said. “I thought the world was mine. I thought I could work out when I wanted to, do what I wanted to, and it took a few months to realize it wouldn’t work.”

Unable to make her senior national cuts and intimidated by her initial experience at that level, MacEwen retreated to junior national swimming. She dominated there, winning the 400-meter freestyle in the 1986 nationals and the 200 and 800 in the 1987 meet.

“I’m this little 14-year-old, my first time there, and boy did it scare me,” MacEwen said of her first senior national experience. “Right around the middle of that three-year period where I got stuck, it was almost more comfortable to be at junior nationals and at the top of junior nationals rather than at the bottom of senior nationals.”

MacEwen showed signs of breaking out of her swimming lethargy in the Southern Section meet this year when she placed third in the 500-yard free and fifth in the 200 free. Her top-16 finish in the nationals should catch recruiters’ eyes as she enters her senior year.

“Freshman year, Texas was the place I had to go,” MacEwen said. “All I know now is that when I go to college I want it to be a Division I school, and I want to swim four years. Now that I’m on the right track after three years of going nowhere, four years doesn’t seem that much.”