By Doga Gur

For those that are around the San Jose State University athletics program and follow the Spartan women’s swimming and diving team in particular, it’s hard to miss noticing the bubbly Nicole “Nikki” Chapman around campus and on the pool deck. Not too many, though, are likely to be entirely aware of the tremendous challenges she has had to endure in attempting to complete her college career as a competitor, and not just a spectator.

Due to two freak incidents that have taken a major toll on her back, one a locker-room fall caused by an over-zealous teammate following a club practice while just 13 years old, and the other a serious car accident late in her senior year of high school, Chapman has had to fight through years of pain, tests, medication, needles, and frustration over the uncertainty surrounding her condition, to make it through to the final stages of her collegiate swimming career as a senior team co-captain for the Spartans this season.

A native of Diamond Bar, Calif., and 2004 graduate of Sonora High School in La Habra, Calif., Chapman credits her sister, Diana McDonald, for getting her started in swimming.

“My older sister used to swim, and I would always have to go to practice with her,” explains Chapman. “It was just one of those things. ‘Oh, I want to be like my big sister.’ I happened to be an overweight little child, so my mom decided to put me in swimming to get some exercise. That’s how I got started. I’ve always looked up to my sister.

“I started competing when I was nine. My first swim meet was terrible. It was so sad. I had to swim the 100 butterfly. I had never swam butterfly in my life. It took me like three minutes to swim the whole thing. Normally, it takes about a minute, or a minute and 10 seconds. After that race, I told myself, ‘I’m going to be so much better than this.’ I was determined. A year later, I swam the 100 butterfly in a minute and three seconds.”

A promising swimming career was derailed and Chapman’s life completely changed, however, by her fall on December 30, 1999. Though hurt badly at first, Chapman practiced the following day, and terms it, “the best practice of my life.” Later that night, on New Year’s Eve, the pain in her back that still exists in some form today, began.

“I had doctor’s appointment after doctor’s appointment, MRI after MRI, and nobody could tell me what was wrong,” says Chapman. “I tried swimming again, but it was really hard. I swam from January until June (2000), not knowing what was wrong with me, but still training, still going at it every day.

“It was finally figured out that I had a bulging disc pressing against the nerves in my back. To do sports in my condition, would not be a good idea, but I was told that swimming was the best exercise for your back, because there’s no impact, so I just took that and kept swimming. High school was hard. I missed out on a lot of things.

Then on May 22, 2004, a week after her 18th birthday, the high school senior was involved in a car accident, with the other driver running a red light and leaving Chapman with a fractured left foot and two fractured hands. She was forced into a wheelchair for a month, including for her high school graduation ceremony.

Her back got worse from there.

After doctors uncovered a degenerative condition in her spine in 2005, Chapman ultimately underwent surgery on June 19, 2006, to replace one of two collapsed discs.

Explains Chapman, “For seven years of my life, from the age of 13 in eighth grade, to 20, I was on painkillers the whole time. I had to rely on medicine every day. I wasn’t like a normal teenage kid. I felt like I was an 80-year-old person sometimes. From days not being able to walk, to not going to school, to not being able to go to a high school dance because I was hurt, it was sad. I couldn’t do a lot.

“I knew that surgery was going to be the best thing. It was going to make me feel so much better, and it did. After June 19, I was so happy that I had the surgery and that I didn’t have constant, chronic pain anymore. To be a student-athlete, that’s not what my surgery was for. It was to help my quality of life, and it has, completely.

“My doctor said that what you’re doing is pushing the limits of your surgery, to continue swimming the way that I did, at a Division I school. I was so excited after the procedure, but it was a long summer. It was a three-month recovery process, from a walker, to a cane, and then to walking very slowly, to actually walking, was a challenge in itself.

“(San Jose State head coach) Sage (Hopkins) got me back into the best possible shape I could be in for coming out of a serious surgery. At the 2007 WAC Championship, I swam the 500 freestyle the first day, and I did my first dive (at the start) and flip turns in seven or eight years. I was scared. Ever since I had gotten hurt, I would start in the water, which is an obvious disadvantage in swimming. I was finally able to do flip turns, which is the best feeling.”

By the end of her first Western Athletic Conference Championship, on the final night of the meet, just eight months removed from major back surgery, Chapman qualified from morning preliminaries into a bonus consolation final in the evening in the 200 backstroke.

“I don’t think it processed in my mind,” recalls Chapman. “Where I was, what swim meet I was at, or the fact that I even made it back (for an evening swim). It didn’t process in my head, and now when I think about it, I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I did that. That was so cool.’ But at that moment in time, I thought nothing. I think I was just nervous and so excited to swim. I was so excited to be there. If I didn’t swim at WAC because of my back, I would have just been happy that Sage would even bring me.

“It sounds weird, but I’m really down on myself, and really hard on myself. I didn’t think that I was going to swim. I thought that I was going to stop swimming, just altogether. I mean in high school, I don’t even know why I kept swimming. I don’t know why, through everything, I kept swimming. And I finally figured out that I actually love swimming. It’s not even the exercise part, to be in shape, but I actually enjoy it, a lot.

“And to swim at a Division I school, to go to a WAC Championship, and to actually have my coach take me, it was a big deal. I was just happy.”

The conference meet, combined with the Spartans’ end-of-the-year banquet some time later, at which Chapman was voted Most Inspirational by teammates and named a co-captain for the 2007-08 season by Hopkins, convinced Chapman to go it one more year.

“Before WAC, I was not planning on swimming my senior year. I just didn’t think I could do it. Sage, (roommate and best friend) Jillene (Golez), my mom (Theresa Chapman) and my club coach (Kevin Perry) are the ones that really have kept me going, to keep doing this. After WAC, I wanted to come back. I just couldn’t find the reasons why I wanted to do it. But after the banquet, I realized that I could totally do it.

“Our banquet was a big thing. I just didn’t think that my swimming was appreciated. It’s one of those things. You see someone hurt, and you’re like, ‘Why do you keep doing this to your body?’ Should I technically be on a Division I team? No, I shouldn’t. I’m the girl that sometimes is not at practice, because I physically can’t be. For me to watch people swim, who have the talent to swim, who sometimes take it for granted, I envy them so much, because it’s something that I love to do, and I can’t do it to my full potential. I just finally realized that people appreciated what I did. It wasn’t how fast I swam. I literally put my heart and soul into practice, into swimming, into everything.

“Just having Jillene push me as much as she does. She’s so hard on me about things. In the end, what I do, I found that other people look up to me because of it. My mom, she’s so proud of what I do. There are times that I get so low, and so upset. I’m not how I was when I was 13 years old (in swimming). I physically will never get there. But people continue to encourage me, and being dedicated to the sport, I decided that it would be stupid if I stopped now. I’ve gone this far and this long. What’s one more year going to do? It allows me to graduate with the girls that I came in with. Not very many people can say that. First off, you’re a student-athlete in college. Not many people have that chance. I was given this opportunity, and to finish four years, not to cop out, being injured this whole time, I figured if I’ve done it for eight years, I can go for one more.”

Adds Chapman about being named a team captain, “It made me realize that people actually paid attention to me, knew that I tried hard at what I did, and that I love swimming. I hoped that they thought I encouraged people to swim faster, to swim better. I felt like I was somebody they looked up to, and I really took it to heart. It’s just an honor. I was stunned. It meant a lot to me.”

It was a chance taken with a candid letter that helped Chapman on her way north to San Jose in the first place. That, and the direction of Perry, her long-time club coach of over 10 years at Fullerton Aquatic Sports Team (FAST) and a second-generation Spartan.

“I sent out letters to college programs saying that I’m interested in swimming, but that I’m injured and have a hurt back, that it’s a long-term, life-long injury, and that it won’t go away. I didn’t know when I was going to have surgery, so I just put myself out there. In the letter, I explained that swimming was something I loved, and that I really wanted to continue. Ever since I was little, I would think to myself, ‘You’re going to go away to college, and you’re still going to swim.’ I wanted to be a student-athlete. I thought, ‘I’ve worked this long and hard.’ Every single school I contacted, I got a phone call back. Every single school was interested.

“San Jose State was one of the schools I sent the letter to. My club coach had told me about it. I came up here on a recruiting trip and really liked the team.”

Chapman spent last summer working as an intern for MTV in Santa Monica, Calif., helping the production management team for MTV News & Docs handle special features, red carpet events like movie premieres, movie features and celebrity interviews, including doing some on-camera work herself. She recalls a moment from her first assignment, the 2007 MTV Movie Awards, as her summer highlight.

“My all-time favorite actor is John Travolta. I’ve been hooked since Grease. I met him at the Movie Awards, and I was the happiest person ever. We came across each other again at the Hairspray premiere in Hollywood, and I got a chance to interview him.”

For this summer, Chapman is exploring internship opportunities within a number of large corporations, among them Vogue, Gucci, Louis Vuitton and MGM, in Los Angeles, New York or abroad. She would like to work in the fashion or entertainment industry, or both.

What else is in the works for her?

“I want to be a cheerleader next year,” Chapman says with a big smile. The business management major will return to San Jose State for a fifth year, with an expected graduation of May, 2009.

On Saturday, January 26, San Jose State will host Cal State East Bay beginning at 1:00 p.m. at The Aquatics Center on Senior Day, the dual meet marking the final home appearances of Chapman, fellow co-captain Brie Marhenke, Golez, Amanda Carr and Sara Riley. She is in eager anticipation of the presence of her entire immediate family that afternoon: mom, Theresa, father, Jack Chapman, sisters Diana and Lindsey Chapman, stepmother, brother-in-law and 13-month-old niece, Jordyn.

Chapman will then cap her college career at the 2008 WAC Championship in San Antonio, Texas, February 20-23, where the Spartans will be attempting to earn a top-three placement as a team for the first time in program history.

“Our goal is to finish in the top three,” says Chapman. “I think it’s manageable. We can do it. I haven’t seen this team be so strong, from top to bottom, from swimming, to dedication, to working hard in the pool, to having respect for our sport, respect for ourselves. This team has come so far. Us seniors, we have seen this team grow so much. Sage has done a great job. We have the talent and the love of the sport and our coach, to do it.

“As a personal goal, I want to come out of my last meet knowing that, through everything, I did it. I don’t care how fast I swim, or what place I get. The fact is that I get to swim, for the last time, with 25 girls that I’ve trained with so hard over this past year. I’m looking forward to swimming, to being there.

“I just want to come out of the meet, looking back at swimming. I’m going to swim the rest of my life. I’m not going to stop working out. It’s something I’ve done forever. I’m not going to stop. I want to reflect back and when people ask, say, ‘Yeah, I swam for all those years. I swam in college.’

“I want to look back at it and be happy that I did it.”