You’ll have to forgive Emma Sticklen for pushing back our phone call by half an hour, but big things are happening in her life, and she had to get her nails done. See, her engagement party was coming up the following week, and the thing about being a swimmer in an elite program like the one at the University of Texas is that there isn’t always a whole lot of free time to do much of anything, so you take it whenever you can get it.
I have a lot of questions for Sticklen, but since she brought up that manicure at the start of our call, here is my first: “Doesn’t spending all that time in the pool mess up your nails?”
“No,” she says. “We actually get our nails done all the time. That’s a big thing we do before our meets, is have the best nail game you can. If you play volleyball or basketball, you can do your makeup and braid your hair and stuff, but for us, it’s the nails.”
This is as good an introduction as any to Sticklen, who, in addition to being one of the best butterfly swimmers in the country – where she’s a two-time national champion in the 200 fly – is also one of the most bubbly athletes you’ll ever meet. Elite competitive swimming can be a grind, but Sticklen has never failed to embrace her goofiness, even when pushing herself to physical exhaustion in the water. One of her coaches referred to Sticklen, who’s now a fifth-year graduate student, as a “forever freshman.” Sticklen has referred to herself, quite proudly, as “silly” and “weird,” a perfect fit for a Longhorns team known for its looseness in practice and during competitions. And that sense of playfulness has only grown now that Sticklen’s in her last year of college competitive swimming.
In some ways, the pressure is off. Real life beckons soon enough – an impending marriage to her boyfriend (a swimmer at Harvard), a move to Philadelphia, and – after she fell just short of the 2024 Olympics – a future that may or may not include competitive swimming at all. For now, Sticklen has learned how to embrace the moment while still striving to be the best swimmer she can be. And so far, it’s working: In an October dual meet against LSU, Sticklen broke her own personal record in the 200 fly. In November, she broke the SEC record in that event and won four individuals and one relay at the UT Invitational.
But it wasn’t always this way for Sticklen. There was a time when she felt the weight of outside expectations piling on her, even if she didn’t show it. There was a time when she struggled so much to understand what really mattered that she turned to a therapist for help.
“It’s important to unpack the lies you have about yourself,” she says, “and then learn why they’re lies.”
Unlike a lot of the swimmers who compete alongside her at Texas, Sticklen was not a sure thing for national prominence from the time she leapt into a pool. While she won Texas state championships at Taylor High School in Katy, she fell short of making the U.S. junior national team. “I was more of ‘the potential girl,’” she says, but that was enough for Texas women’s swimming and diving coach Carol Capitani to give Sticklen a look, and to make her a scholarship offer.
Capitani is one of the few female coaches at the elite college level, or any level, of women’s swimming – as of last year, fewer than 20 percent of women’s swimming coaches were female. Capitani understood right away how to connect with Sticklen’s fun-loving personality. “When I first talked to her on the phone, I had this immediate connection,” Sticklen recalls. “She asked me about my life. She asked me who I had a crush on. I was like, ‘This woman is so cool.’ She’s kind of like a mom, but she also wants to push me so hard to be my best.”
Sticklen showed up in Austin her freshman year and fit right in with a team that’s often laughing and giggling and stands out as the loosest bunch at any meet. She qualified for the NCAA Championships that spring. She thought she was on her way to stardom; she began to look around, both at her teammates and competitors, and to measure herself more firmly against them. Sophomore year, Sticklen found herself racing against some of the biggest names in the sport, members of the Olympic team like Alex Walsh and Reagan Smith. And suddenly, the pressure came crashing down on her. She came out of the preliminary heats in first place in the 200 butterfly and wound up finishing seventh.
“I felt like I had just arrived to the stage and I kind of got crushed,” she says. “I believed I had to do this because I wasn’t the most highly recruited swimmer, and now I'm finally in the heats with the girls that were highly recruited. It’s almost like it kind of caught up with me. I was like, ‘Oh shit, I’m here.’”
That summer after her sophomore year, in 2022, Sticklen missed qualifying for the national team by one-tenth of a second. She had wrapped up her self-worth in winning, in qualifying, in being as well-known and as famous as the girls she found herself swimming against. She knew she was good enough physically, but mentally, something was holding her back. She began seeing a therapist at the University of Texas. She talked through what she believed about herself, and what she believed about her swimming.
“There were all those other girls and other people who I thought I needed to prove a point to,” she says. “These things that had happened in swimming that had not gone my way or had been really disappointing – I had been carrying that. And I kind of learned to let go of it.”
At the same time, Sticklen learned to control her emotions and to tell herself she was good enough to keep up with the best without getting overly emotional or pushing herself through the early stages of a race. She could make up time; she could win on her own terms.
Junior year, Sticklen won the national championship in the 200 fly.
“I was like, ‘OK, all these people are going to be amped up, and I’ll be amped up too,’” she says. “But I’m going to be calm and controlled and come back with a lot of power in the end. And that was the first time I executed it perfectly.”
Sticklen did it again last spring, winning a second national championship in the 200 fly. By the time she made a run at qualifying for the Paris Olympics in the summer of 2024, she’d gained a newfound sense of perspective. She would go after this for herself, not for anyone else. She embraced the experience at the Olympic trials, of competing in front of thousands; if this was the biggest stage she ever performed in, she was going to enjoy it. And when she fell short of making the Olympic team, she was serene about it. She took a couple of months away from the pool afterward and gained even more perspective.
“I used to think that these national championships and these school records don't matter because the outside world only cares if I make it to the Olympics,” Sticklen tells me. “There are so many big-time athletes at Texas, and they make so much money and have so much fame and clout, and I thought the only way to achieve that was by going to the Olympics. And that became a negative. But then I realized I’m also going to be a two-time national champion forever. And I also had lots of other awesome things that can’t be taken away.”
This spring, she’ll have an opportunity to win a third national championship with a group of teammates and a coach she’s come to love. And after that, who knows? Considering where she started, Sticklen says, she’s wound up in a pretty good place.
“I was just thinking about that at practice today,” she says. “I was like, dang, my coaches took a real chance on me. And they got a good investment.”
(Return to the50athletes.com next Tuesday, Jan. 28, to find out which University of Texas teammate will join her as one of The Fifty Most Interesting Athletes.)