Knowledge and Drive – Notre Dame Business Mendoza College of Business

In aggressive swimming, hundredths of a second could make the distinction between transferring from a warmth to the finals or between medaling and ending fourth.

Everything counts: your gear, your rhythm, your begin. Swimmers spend hours perfecting the seconds between the whistle for “take your mark,” the beep for “go,” their entry dive and first strokes. Mastery of that shaves day off a private finest.

Deaf swimmers have a transparent drawback.

Carli Cronk (BBA ’28), a student-athlete on the University of Notre Dame swim staff, is aware of this effectively. A aggressive swimmer since childhood, she makes use of listening to aids however can’t hear these essential sounds.

“I have to use hand signals,” she mentioned. “When I first started swimming, hand signals were not required, so officials were not required to know them. My coaches did hand starts for me for most of my early career.”

Cronk and her mother and father advocated to USA Swimming for mandating hand alerts at meets. Strobe gentle begins are additionally required now.

“Before competitions, I always have to go the extra length to make sure the officials know what I need and that the strobe light next to my block is working,” she mentioned. “It’s my normal, but to other people, it’s an extra step they don’t have to take.”

Cronk remembers a meet throughout her first yr at Notre Dame the place the strobe was malfunctioning, and the officers wouldn’t enable hand alerts from her coaches.

“I was at a major disadvantage. I had to start with absolutely nothing.”

She approaches overcoming such obstacles with aplomb. In addition to rigorous coursework in her main of enterprise analytics on the Mendoza College of Business, she’s coming off her second look within the NCAA championships, the place she lately positioned tenth within the 200 butterfly.

When she was 13, Cronk was the youngest swimmer on the 2018 Deaf World Championships. In 2022, she would go on to win 12 gold medals on the Deaflympics in Brazil, probably the most ever by a person at a single recreation, and be named Sportswoman of the Year from the International Committee of Sports for the Deaf, Deaflympics’ governing physique. The U.S. Swimming Federation additionally awarded her “most outstanding performance” and the 2022 Zorn award.

At the Deaflympics in Tokyo in November 2025, Cronk collected seven medals: 5 golds, a silver and a bronze.

But for Cronk, success within the pool has all the time been about greater than medals and information.

“None of that matters if the team isn’t like your family,” she mentioned, which is what drew her to Notre Dame.

“I took a bunch of recruiting visits, and the team here was like nothing else,” she remembered.  “I’m a big body language reader and I could see how they all loved one another. There was just a cohesiveness I was looking for.”

Swimming is a solitary sport in some ways, and Cronk has principally educated for particular person, mid-distance occasions.

“You are staring at a black line for two to four hours a day, just swimming back and forth. It gets pretty mentally draining, especially after three 75-minute classes,” she mentioned.

Though their pool’s underwater audio system pump in music to enliven the laps, Cronk says she will’t hear it. Chatting with teammates on the partitions after every size helps. This yr she competed in a four-person relay occasion for the primary time on the ACC and NCAA Championships.

“That has been amazing. Being on that big NCAA stage with my teammates was special.”

Cronk appreciates how effectively Notre Dame helps teachers and athletics.

“Often you have to pick one, but here you can do both. The professors here have an understanding of a student-athlete’s life. When I was in Tokyo for two and a half weeks, my professors made sure I was in the loop. I still did all my work, but they were very supportive.”

She is especially enthusiastic about finding out in Italy for 3 weeks this summer time for the immersion course Innovation & Design Thinking. She and different college students work in multi-national groups with main design corporations in Milan on shopper initiatives utilizing ethnographic analysis abilities to know unmet client wants.

“It’s been really cool to see how you can take all this data and visualize it so people understand it.”

With two years forward of enterprise programs and swimming successes to encourage her, Cronk has so much nonetheless to perform.

“All your friends being at practice, laughing with them — that’s what keeps me going,” she mentioned. “You can have so many achievements in swimming, but I would not be here without my friends and my family supporting me.”