Panther Paralympians look to make their mark
Northern Iowa sends three to the Games in Paris, including a swimmer being cheered on by Flavor Flav
Iowa universities have had their moments on the Olympic stage. Iowa State’s track teams kicked butt on the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum track in 1984 with seven Cyclones, including gold medalist Nawal El Moutawakel. Ten Iowa Hawkeyes headed to Seoul for the 1988 Games. Even Drake got a gold medal with softball player Dani Tyler in 1996.
And when the Paralympics begin on Aug. 28, the Games will have a Northern Iowa look to them, giving Team USA a little purple and gold to go with the red, white and blue.
Three Panthers/Panther alums will compete in Paris and one coach will be on staff, providing Iowa fans with Olympics withdrawal another chance to cheer for local athletes.
Swimmer Olivia Chambers, soon to be a Panther senior, will compete in five individual events. Former Panther track athletes Jessica Heims (discus) and Erin Kerkhoff (400 meters) will be there, too. Assistant swim coach Ben Colin is on the Team USA coaching staff.
Northern Iowa hasn’t set out to be a destination for adaptive athletes and Paralympians, it’s just the coincidental timing of some talented athletes who found success there.
“The formula at Northern Iowa is poised for Paralympians to be successful because we want to value everyone’s abilities and how they can thrive in what they do,” said Athletic Director Megan Franklin, citing a college landscape that is changing with the NIL (name, image, likeness) money-making options at larger schools, particularly football powers. “That’s just not us; that’s just not what we do.”
For Chambers, from Little Rock, Arkansas, the trip to Paris is the latest turn in an unexpected athletic path. Already a star swimmer, she lost her sight suddenly at age 16 and was diagnosed with multiple mitochondrial gene deletion syndrome. She also suffers from nystagmus, a condition in which her eyes make repetitive, uncontrolled movements. At first her family and doctors thought it was temporary, but later learned her visual impairment was permanent and she is legally blind. (Her classification is S13, visually impaired with limited vision.)
Chambers was beginning to get recruited for college swimming when she lost her sight. Then, COVID hit and it changed the recruiting process entirely. Some schools cut funding or their entire teams, but she connected with Northern Iowa.
“It was a crazy time. We didn’t get to actually meet the coaches or team face to face,” she said. “I just did calls to them. I did get to visit the campus, I did a Zoom with some of the team and liked their dynamic.”
Despite her visual impairment, Chambers fared well right away as a freshman for the Panthers and has established herself as a distance specialist. She finished seventh in the 1,650 freestyle at the Missouri Valley Conference championships in 2023. Her longest race in Paris, though, will be the 400-meter freestyle.
“After my freshman year conference meet my coaches came up to my mom and said Para swimming was something I should look into,” Chambers said. “They thought I could really excel in that.”
They were right; at the Paralympic Trials earlier this summer, she swam the fastest 400 freestyle time in the world this year in her classification and earned a silver medal at last year’s World Para Swimming Championships in Manchester, England.
Chambers maneuvers through the pool by counting strokes, something she had to learn after losing her sight.
“Every now and then going into a new pool is a challenge, but we’ll have a couple practices before we have to race,” she said. “Sometimes the lighting can throw me off but with a few practice sessions, I’m good to go.”
Working with Chambers meant adjusting some aspects of coaching, said Colin, who will be part of the Team USA Paralympic swim staff. Coaches make sure to clearly explain things verbally instead of using a white board. They’re mindful of where they place pace clocks at the end of the lanes during practice. And if it’s a new pool that challenges Chambers, a coach will use a pool noodle attached to a 12-foot PVC pipe to tap her to alert her of the coming wall. (The device is allowed in other Paralympic swim classifications, but not Chambers’.)
“Olivia’s incredibly fun to work with, she loves to race, she loves to go fast,” said Colin, a Dubuque native who swam at Iowa. “Swimming is the most important thing to her, so we’ve got that in common – I’m quite the swim nerd. She loves to work hard, she always wants the next challenge. If I write something up, she’ll look at how she can make it harder and go and do it.”
Colin isn’t the only Olivia Chambers fan out there. During the Paris Olympics, rapper Flavor Flav became known for his support of the U.S. women’s water polo team and other Olympians. He found out about other athletes who had fundraising efforts and elevated them, too, with his social media posts.
One was a link to a Go Fund Me campaign that Chambers’ mother, Alison, had begun so the Chambers family could travel to Paris. When Flavor Flav told the world, the family quickly met its goal. In addition, Raygun is selling a shirt celebrating Chambers, with proceeds benefiting the Northern Iowa swimming and diving program.
The Panther community has gotten behind its Paralympians, hosting a sendoff party for Heims and Kerkhoff earlier this week. There was an earlier party for Chambers, too, but she’s now off to Europe to begin her training.
Not only do Heims and Kerkhoff have a chance to represent Team USA and Iowa, they have a chance to bring home some hardware.
Heims, from Swisher, Iowa, and now living in Bondurant, is the current world record holder in the discus in her classification with a throw of 40.79 meters (133 feet 8 inches) in May. Heims, whose right leg was amputated when she was a toddler, had also set a world record of 37.23/122-3 at the Drake Relays in 2022.
Heims was a Paralympian before she got to college, competing in Rio in 2016, where she also ran the 400 meters. She wasn’t recruited by Northern Iowa, which had never had an adaptive athlete, but Coach Dave Paulsen was intrigued by her talents after learning about her.
“She and her parents reached out to me about the possibility of being on the team,” Paulsen said. “It just seemed like the right fit. Just to help someone reach their goals – Paralympian or not – is what we do.”
Panthers staff recruited Kerkhoff without knowing the extent of her visual impairment. She had been a top runner at Solon and anchored its 4x400 team to a state title and two runner-up finishes. Kerkhoff is legally blind but had eschewed Paralympic competition early on.
“We had a conversation about the Paralympics and she was hesitant, so we tabled it and came back to it in 2020, when she made the decision to go for it,” Paulsen said. “I’m glad she did, she’s done a great job with it.”
At the Paralympic world championships earlier this year, Kerkhoff won a silver medal in the 200 and finished fourth in the 400. She competed in the Tokyo Paralympics in 2021, finishing eighth in the 400.
The success of Heims and Kerkhoff has been a boon to the entire Panther team, Paulsen said.
“To see them succeed on the world stage, it raises how teammates want to elevate themselves,” Paulsen said. “It raises the work ethic and expectations of those around you. They did that in a big way for us.”
Unlike Chambers’ swimming races that are conveniently over the noon hours, Paulsen expects to be up in the wee hours watching track and field events because of the seven-hour time difference. That’s OK, the mere fact that he can watch at all shows great strides in the exposure of the Paralympic Games. This year, more than 1,500 hours will be broadcast primarily on the streaming service Peacock and USA Network, compared with 1,200 hours for Tokyo 2021. Rio 2016 saw just 77 hours of coverage, before live streaming services became a player for sports broadcasting and before Peacock’s 2020 launch.
“It’s great what’s happening,” Paulsen said. “It’s like the WNBA – if you promote it, if you tell people’s stories, people will watch.
“People are intrigued by stories of how people got where they are. If you look at the Paralympics in general, it’s full of people who were not going to let their situation define who they were and the fact that we can showcase that more is great.”
The Paralympic Games are Aug. 28-Sept. 8, beginning with the Opening Ceremony that will be broadcast live on USA Network and Peacock at 1 p.m. CDT.
More information: Team USA pages for Olivia Chambers, Jessica Heims and Erin Kerkhoff; Northern Iowa page detailing Olivia Chambers’ schedule; full broadcast schedule.
Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”
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What great stories these young women have! Thanks for writing them.
Thank you for lifting up these Panther Paralympians, too easily overlooked! They deserve the recognition and support!