A young Nicholas Fainlight with his brother, Ben

Nicholas Fainlight has played a number of sports throughout his life, such as football, basketball, baseball and water polo. He has always enjoyed being active, but swimming is his biggest passion.

Swimming was not always his favorite sport. In fact, he started off with baseball. When he was young, he would always stay in the batting cages working to tweak his technique.He believes that baseball is a great way to focus yourself. Playing baseball and working on tuning his technique was extremely important to Fainlight. It allowed him to control his mind and keep it in tune with his body.

Nicholas with the Loomis Chaffee Baseball Team.

It was this precision and fine-tuning that allowed Nicholas Fainlight to fall in love with swimming as well. He got involved with swimming when he was a freshman in high school. He had been playing football, but had grown tired of it and wanted to change things up. His advisor suggested that he try out water polo since he had good arms from playing baseball. Fainlight took up the sport and it immediately clicked. Once the water polo season ended, he noticed that most of the water polo team stayed in the water by participating in the swim team during swim season. He figured he’d join in and do swimming as well. He did not yet know how important swimming would be to him.

The swim team was a close-knit group of guys that were like a family. They all worked hard and supported each other, pushing each other to succeed. Fainlight realized what a beautiful sport swimming is and it got him through high school.

Nicholas Fainlight loves everything about swimming. He loves how smooth and fluid it is. Just like baseball, swimming allows you to keep your body and mind in sync with one another. Swimming is a personal sport but a team sport at the same time. Fainlight loves being in the water and thinking about how to be as streamlined as possible. The smallest technical things can make or break a swimmer, and he is fascinated by this. Swimming is a sport that pushes you to work harder to be faster than the person next to you. Fainlight likes to use this drive to get better throughout all aspects of his life.

Nicholas with the Loomis Chaffee Swim Team

Sports are very important to one’s development, as Nicholas Fainlight learned in a class about associating, leading, and serving. In this class, he learned that athletics allows a kid to learn at an early age whether he or she is a leading personality or an aiding personality. Sports allow kids to build camaraderie at a young age and also build respect for adults. When a young person joins a sports team, he or she is given people to look up to and a team to go to for support. Athletic kids can also learn that there is not one way to do things right.

Nicholas Fainlight believes that the most important thing to get out of athletics is confidence. As a young child, he was quiet and shy, but he was able to relax once he got into baseball. From then on, he enjoyed sports as a way to stay active and to be around people. He remains passionate about swimming and also golf as a hobby.