By Joshua D. Scroggin
Reprinted with Permission from The Merced Sun-Star

She still can't explain it.

Stephanie Salvi felt almost incapacitated just moments before breaking one of the two oldest Merced College women's swimming records.

That morning, she felt like she had two big arm-shaped bruises attached to her shoulders, her muscles were sore and during the final preliminary, she said she went numb and couldn't move.

She'd experienced debilitation before. The freshman thought she'd never swim again after surviving a fatal car accident going into her junior year of high school.

"I remember it," Salvi said. "I think about it all the time. When I get mad at myself for not doing better, I just say, 'No you did the best that you can do. You're here. That's all that you can do.'"

Although she still suffers soreness from the crash, this time, extreme nervousness of being at the state championships got the blame for the pain and anxiety.

But when the buzzer sounded and Salvi hit the water for the 100-yard breast stroke final, she improbably shaved more than two seconds off her personal-best time to eclipse Debbie Crea's 21-year-old Blue Devils' record, something neither she, nor nine-year MC coach Bill Halpin, thought would be possible.

"I just ended up getting out in the water, and something just took over me," Salvi said. "Then I popped out a 1:08 out of nowhere."

Salvi took fifth overall at 1:08.22 seconds -- the fifth best time in the nation this year -- besting Crea's 1984 record by .16 and her own best time by nearly 2.5 seconds.

"Really, it was a shock to me," Salvi said. "I got out of the water and said, 'What the heck did I just swim? Where did that come from?' "

Her mom told her she beat the record shortly after the swim, but Salvi wanted to hear it from Halpin and tried to act surprised when he came over and broke the good news.

"I thought that would be the hardest record to break," Halpin said. "We've never had anybody even close to that."

The driver of the car the day of the accident, Salvi's high school swimming teammate Sarah Murphy, was also there to cheer her on. The third passenger was not.

Murphy's 12-year-old sister Jennifer died in the accident.

The three were coming back from a summer day trip to the lake when an accidental steering overcorrection sent the girls' car head-on into an oncoming vehicle. Salvi said the crash ripped the car in half, sending her and Sarah to the pavement in nothing but their swimsuits.

Road rashed but still alive, Salvi thought her athletic career was over.

"The pain in my back was so horrible, I thought I wouldn't be able to do anything," Salvi said. "For one whole year, I was out of the water."

But the compressed spinal disk Salvi suffered and the road rash scars on her legs could have been much worse. And for that reason, she knew she had to come back.

"Really, it made me more determined to do my best," Salvi said. "(Jennifer) was the nicest, sweetest person in the world. It could have been one of us."

Salvi made a comeback her senior year at Beyer High School in Modesto, where she qualified for the high school state meet. She graduated and came to MC to play water polo for Halpin, swimming only as means to stay in shape in the offseason.

"She could have very well been dead herself," Halpin said. "She's lucky to be swimming, probably."

By the end of the season, she had garnered the best times on the team -- but not without severe bouts with anxiety before each swim.

"She's a bundle of nerves and I keep telling her she'll do good," Halpin said. "She's always before a race saying, 'Oh my shoulder hurts' or 'my arm hurts.' She's always got an excuse. So I've got to stop her.

"She just sits there and she gives you all the reasons why she can't do it, and I try to give her all the reasons why she can -- and I don't want to hear the reasons why she can't."

Despite the lingering effects of the car accident, Halpin knew Salvi still had the potential to be on of the best breast stoke swimmers the Blue Devils have ever had. But breaking Crea's record in the 100, especially being more than 2 seconds away that late in the season never even entered his mind.

"In her case, it was two and a half seconds," Halpin said, "and that's just unbelievable. That's like running a mile in 4:20 and then breaking 4 minutes."

Salvi's using it as motivation to break Crea's record in the 50, where she is currently only .3 off at 31.94 seconds.

She still isn't quite sure how she was able to zone out and put up such an impressive time at the state meet, but perhaps she shouldn't think back to anything but the incident that nearly ended it all.

"Jennifer is my guardian angel now," Salvi said. "Everything that happens in my life is really because of her."

This article was reprinted with permission of the Merced Sun-Star