Sarasota High swimmer wins four golds at her first-ever high school meet

At her first high school swim meet on Sept. 8, in races that are not her forte, Natalie Stafford, 14, proved herself.

The freshman, who swims for Sarasota High but attends Suncoast Polytechnical High, first proved herself in the 2018 Phil “Boomer” Denis Invitational’s 200-yard medley relay, swimming the anchoring freestyle portion in 24.58 seconds to help the Sailors earn a gold medal and a 1:54.86 overall time. That was cool enough, Stafford said, but then she swam the individual 50 freestyle.

She won that, too, in 25.90 seconds.

“It was cool that I won, but then I had to get ready for my other races,” Stafford said. “There was no time to think about it.”

Stafford would go on to win the 100 freestyle (55.43) and swim the second, and fastest, leg (25.24) of the gold medal 200 freestyle relay team. That's four first-place finishes in Stafford's first high school meet.

After the bustle of the Denis Invitational, Stafford had plenty of time to think about her accomplishment. She didn't expect to win, she said, in part because she didn't know what to expect. Not only was this her first meet, but Stafford also is typically a distance swimmer. She prefers long races, she said, because there’s more room for error. If you don’t hit a turn perfectly, that’s OK. You can make up for it later, she said. Her favorite is the 200 butterfly, even though “it hurts really bad,” she said. With sprints, there’s no time to recover.

Thankfully for Stafford, she didn’t make any fatal mistakes.

Her competitive swimming career started five years ago, and not as well as Stafford would have liked. She didn’t make any state cuts during her first two years. It was frustrating, Stafford said, but the failure to make a cut also kept her motivated.

When she turned 12, she said, she made states for the first time, in the 50 freestyle. To this day, the moment is her favorite of her career, she said, because of how hard she worked to achieve it. After making that first cut, they started coming and didn’t stop, she said.

Stafford’s club coach with the SKY Family YMCA Hurricanes, Bruce Patmos, has watched Stafford swim three of the past five years. He agreed with her personal assessment: Her first two years of swimming were spent developing a base of skills. Once she turned 12, something changed, and she “took off,” he said.

“She has a good feel for the water,” Patmos said. “She trains well, and fast. She does it all full speed. She has a high ‘swimming IQ,’ as I call it, which is rare for someone her age. She’s at the top of her game for someone 14 years old.”

At Stafford’s age, Patmos said, it’s difficult to project where she will go in the future. But Patmos, who has coached three Olympians during his career in southern California and Ohio, including two-time gold medalist Anthony Ervin, said Stafford may ride a similar trajectory.

“It’s neat to see someone here following in that path,” Patmos said. “Will she get there or not? We’ll have to see.”

Stafford followed up the Denis Invitational by winning the 50 (25.50) and 100 (54.78) freestyle races again Sept. 11 at a dual meet against Riverview, though her Sailors' relay teams both finished second. She wants to become an individual medley swimmer, she said, because being able to swim all four strokes “seems pretty cool,” she said. As the year continues, she expects to do more distance races than she’s been doing, and also expects to make the state meet.

Maybe the postseason will shape itself like Stafford’s pre-12 year old career, and it will take a year or two for her to make the top-eight in an event, as she admitted is a possibility.

Or maybe it will shape itself like her first high school meet, and she’ll find the medal stand. After all, she could have swam anywhere coming from Suncoast Poly, but chose Sarasota because of its 4A status. Stafford likes a challenge, she said. Don’t count her out of this one.