Meet The Author: Carla Albano
On Valentine’s Day 2018, the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history occurred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Seventeen people were killed.
The news flashed onto the screen of Carla Albano’s iPad as she sat on a boat off a remote island in the Caribbean, where she was training for the Swim Around Key West, a 12.5-mile open water race. Nicholas Dworet’s picture appeared among the lives lost. In the middle of training miles a day for her swimming comeback after nearly 40 years, Albano was startled by the news of a fellow swimmer’s tragic passing.
“It was, like, how could someone have killed a swimmer?” Albano reflected on the moment she saw Nick’s face fill the screen. “Let alone that they killed 16 other amazing people, too.”
Albano has been a swimmer since she was a young girl growing up in California. Her swim club coach frequently took a group to train in the ocean, allowing Albano to develop into a strong open water swimmer and become the first female beach lifeguard in Long Beach – an experience she describes as “really exciting, kind of scary, and definitely unexpected.” While lifeguarding, she also competed on the California State University Long Beach swim team for two years before retiring from the sport.
Though she stopped swimming competitively in her early 20s, the impact swimming left on Albano is undeniable. When studying for the California Bar exam, Albano kept her California Interscholastic Federation medal on the table. It served as a physical reminder of the mindset and discipline she needed to be a successful swimmer and a future lawyer.
“In some ways, I was still a swimmer, applying the principles of swimming to my business career,” Albano said. “I really think that almost every day, it guided me as a professional.”
After spending years as a healthcare lawyer, Albano and her husband moved to Florida. Together, they created and for 25 years operated a home healthcare business. After retiring, Albano, her husband, and their cat named Monkey moved close to the International Swimming Hall of Fame pool in Fort Lauderdale. Coming back to swimming was part of the plan.
“Swimming is just wrapped around my heart,” Albano explained. “It was the camaraderie, it was being retired, being able to do what I really wanted to do, which is swim.”
Four months after the Parkland shooting, Albano met Nick’s parents, Mitch and Annika Dworet, at a tree-planting ceremony in remembrance of their son. Feeling a connection to Nick as a fellow swimmer, Albano was moved to act.
She wrote an application to the International Swimming Hall of Fame, hoping to get Nick inducted, and that set in motion Albano’s desire to write a book. In learning about Nick through his closest friends and family while writing the application, Albano came to know Nick as an amazing kid whose story should be told.
Many months later, Albano approached Nick’s parents about writing his biography. After talking it through, the Dworets gave their blessing to the book that would become Albano’s Soul of a Swimmer.
Albano had never written a book before. She worked with a book coach to develop the story’s structure and direction, and she pieced together interviews with Nick’s coaches, teammates, friends, and family. In these many conversations, she felt the grief that permeated through the lives of Nick’s loved ones.
“When you are working with people that are grieving, you have to grieve with them, and you have to know when to stop,” Albano said. Some interviews were particularly overwhelming, such as with Nick’s girlfriend, Daria. “I actually had to stop that interview because I didn't want to make any of her feelings worse than they already were,” Albano recalled.
Albano says that Nick continues to motivate his teammates even after his death. Carlos Vasquez, a friend and teammate of Nick’s, told Albano that all he did when he got in the pool was think about Nick. Vasquez is now a swimmer at Penn State in his senior year, and he holds national swimming records for his native Honduras.
“(Nick is) still present within all of the kids, and in a positive way still impacting the community,” Albano said. “I am hoping by having the book out there, too, that he will be present in the non-swimming community. This person is not just a tally, nor were the other 16.”
Albano is donating all the proceeds from Soul of a Swimmer to the Nicholas Dworet Memorial Trust. The money will go to swimming-related causes, such as funding scholarships for college swimmers, helping Special Olympics participants learn to swim, aiding club swimmers with financial difficulties, and supporting drowning prevention charities.
You can purchase Soul of a Swimmer from many Barnes & Noble stores in South Florida, as well as online at Barnes & Noble and Amazon. Team bulk orders are available by emailing publishing@cgsportsmanagement.com. Join the mailing list to stay up to date on Soul of a Swimmer news, like where you can meet Carla at a book signing near you.
