Shelby Calvert

When the Harvard women's swim team arrived in Los Angeles last year for its annual training trip, Coach Vicki Hays tried to recruit someone to help with the driving duties. But when she asked her athletes if any of them had ever driven a van, everyone remained silent.

Finally, Shelby Calvert spoke up. "I've driven a tank," she said, "Does that count?"

Calvert, now the squad's co-captain, spent two years at West Point before coming to Cambridge.

Hays recalls being "pleasantly surprised" two summers ago when she received a letter from Calvert informing her that the cadet intended to swim for the Crimson in the upcoming season.

The decision to transfer was a difficult one at first Calvert says. As a sophomore, she had already been named a platon sergeant, and some of the Academy's officers encouraged her to stay.

"I had good positions up until that point," she says, "and I had good athletics and good grades, which are the two qualities that they look for."

Calvert wanted to go into military intelligence, but she realized that in the army she wouldn't have control of her future. "You may get what you want to do or you may have to respond to higher orders," she says. "To follow my career goals, I knew I'd have to go elsewhere."

As it turned out, Harvard's higher-ups issued some orders that made Calvert's first months in Cambridge rather unpleasant. As a transfer student, she did not qualify for on campus housing, and the best accomodations Harvard could provide the former cadet was a room is the Jordan Cooperatives.

"I had expected a diametric switch when I transferred from West Point, which is said to be oriented to the right, to liberal-minded Harvard. And not only was I moving to this liberal campus, but [the Co-op] was the most liberal of the liberal. After coming from all West Point structure, I was thrown into a situation where duty dishes were always lying around the house, and dinner usually wasn't ready," Calvert recalls.

"I just wanted to say 'Look, this is the way it's supposed to run," she continues. "That would work at West Point. But you try to tell someone at the Co-op and they say, "Though, that's not what I want to do.' And there's nothing you could do to enforce the rules. It frustrated me, because it could have been a very pleasant arrangement."

After a semester in the Co-op, Calvert moved into Curner House, where she now resides.

Calvert's performance on the swim team never reflected the problems she had with her housing situation. With fellow Co-Captain Jeanne Floyd, Calvert made Harvard's middle-distance corps one of the finest in the Ivy League and among the top in the entire East Coast. And by the end of her fist season in a Crimson suit, Calver had qualified for Nationals in two individual events, the 200 back and the 500 free, and as a member of the 800 freestyle relay.

And already this year, Calert has qualified for the Eastern championships in no less than seven events.

But Calvert hasn't always been so successful in the pool. In fact, as a first-grader in New Mexico, the Harvard team captain flunked beginners' swimming.

"I wouldn't get into the water because it was always cold," she recalls. "They had to lure me into the water with those flotation eggs and they made the swim with them." Calvert persisted and eventually passed the beginners' test.

Calvert has always led a rather nomadic life. She left New Mexico and her initial aquatic failure behind for Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, and then moved first to Alabarna and then to California, where she finished high school. After another move back to Kwajalein, her family took up residence in Jaspar, Alabama, this year.

During her first stay in Alabama, Calvert became a competitive swimmer.

"When I go to Alabama, I joined the neighborhood swim team and I found out that I was better than all my friends," she says.

When I was 14, I really got serious, doing a lot of double work-outs. I would get up at four in the morning, practice from five to seven, go to school from eight to two, do weights from two to three, and swim from three to six. Then I'd go home eat, talk on the phone for an hour until I realized I was exhausted, and go to sleep."

Obviously, the dedicated has paid off, and not just in the pool. In December, Calvert made it to the final round of competition for the Rhodes Scholarship as one of two representatives from Alabana.

"I think Shelby is unique in this she is the type of person who would decide to apply at West Point in the first place and would decide two years later that that wasn't really for her," Coach Hays says of her captain "Shelby is a very independent soul. She is a great combination of people. She can work hard and encourage others to work hard and meanwhile maintain a positive self-image."