Joseph Clements '26 Recruiting Profile

Hi, my name is Joseph Clements. I first started my athletic journey playing soccer. I played soccer for about 3.5 years, from the young age of 5 to 8. I very much enjoyed playing soccer because I was able to use all of the extra energy I had saved up. Over the years, I continued to enjoy soccer, but I started to be unable to keep up with people as they were growing much faster than me, and I seemed to always get hit by the ball. After all of that time playing soccer, I wasn’t just going to sit at home and do nothing all day; I wanted some exercise to keep me active. It was then, at 8 years old, I discovered competitive swimming.

Because swimming was a sport where everyone was racing against, and trying to beat their own times, I thought it would be interesting for me. At the time, I was not very into team sports because I was not a very sociable person. After many years of swimming, though, I have come to realize that swimming is very much a team sport. When you are racing, your teammates are cheering for you. When your teammates are racing, you are cheering for them. 90% of the time spent swimming isn’t even racing; it’s training, warming up, and cooling down, and those are all great times to encourage yourself and others while being encouraged back in full by friends. Although I started swimming with the mindset of “I don’t want to do a team sport," my mindset has done a complete 180 to the point now where it’s one of the driving factors as to why I still swim to this day.

I’d like to think that some of the cause of the 180-degree flip in my mindset was due to some of my upper-classmen. When I first joined the high school swim team, I did every practice with them, and because of this, I was able to meet some very nice upper-classmen. I became friends with them very quickly, and they “took me under their wing,” teaching me lots of things about high school swimming. They made sure I understood how the meets were different from club swimming and how they run them in high school. In Davis, the town where I grew up, 7th–9th grade is still in middle school, and even though I was not going to the same school as them at the time, they still made sure that I knew how things were going to be run and went the extra mile to be friends with me. 

It was really fun being friends with all of them, but as time passed, they were upper-classmen, and they are now starting to graduate one by one. I feel that all the support I was receiving from them made a much greater impact on my swimming. Then I realized why I wanted to do what they did and go that extra mile to befriend and help out the new kids on the swim team when they join and “take them under my wing." I know that without them, I would have been pretty lost my first year, and I don’t want that to happen to someone else. If someone has a bad time in their first year of something new, that may lead them to believe that every year will be the same, and they might end up quitting. I very much want to prevent that from happening. 

In terms of accomplishments, I have had a couple that I thought were really cool. When I was in 8th grade, I was able to qualify for a big team away meet where we went all the way to Arizona State University, from Davis, California, to race against other really fast teams. Another big accomplishment was qualifying for sectionals in both my freshman and sophomore years. One more accomplishment I was proud of, even though it was not as big, was placing first in my heat for the JV 200-yard I.M. in every meet up until sectionals my freshman year, scoring my team lots of points. 

After swimming for such a large portion of my life, I felt I had a duty to give back to my community. To be able to do this, I looked at my own swim team. My swim team does summer swim lessons for kids who don’t swim year-round, and I was able to get a job coaching them during the summer between my 9th and 10th grades. I coached three days a week and did volunteer work on Tuesday and Thursdays, coaching kids with disabilities. I enjoyed doing this so much that the next summer, my 10th to 11th grade summer, I coached again and got a job as a lifeguard for my city. 

As I look towards the next chapter of my life and swim career, I am looking for an academically challenging college with a competitive swim team, where I can major in engineering. I am not too worried about the size of the college or the Division. I just want to help make an impact and help my new swim team achieve their goals.