Whether it's pushing herself to be faster in the pool or urging other Black athletes to make their voices heard, Olivia Jack has always led by example.
"It's not necessarily asking for people to join me," the Penn State senior swimmer says, "but hoping that people see what I'm doing and want to follow along."
Jack recently set two personal bests at the Big Ten Championships in Madison, Wis., placing 11th in the 100-meter breaststroke with a time of 1:00.68, good for 11th-best at the meet and sixth-best in school history, and a mark of 22.49 in the 50-meter freestyle. She was also part of a Nittany Lion 200 medley relay team that set a school record and an NCAA B standard with a time of 1:36.79.
As she has pushed, and been pushed by, her teammates, Jack has also found ways to provide support for Black athletes across sports and across the country during her four years at Penn State. She created the Penn State Black Student Athletes Association, which currently includes approximately 40 registered members from various Nittany Lion teams, plus other student-athletes who attend organizational events, which have included cookouts, game nights and discussions about societal and on-campus issues.
"My hope is to just have the Black Student Athletes Association be a big family, a place of support where freshman athletes know they are welcomed at Penn State athletics, even if they might not see faces that look like theirs," she says. "They can meet other athletes on campus they can talk to about situations or just hang out with, just to have that cultural connection within athletics.
"If we're trying to be as successful as we can be as a school athletically, I think it's also important to support one another. I'm just trying to start within my cultural community to make sure we have those familial connections."
Along with Emma Anderson, then a senior at Niskayuna High School in upstate New York, Jack has also been a driving force for the Athletes for Equal Rights website, which launched in 2020. The site chronicles Black sports history as well as recent racial injustices and causes. Jack is one of more than two dozen Black college athletes who shares her personal story on the site, which she says "is really just a place for athletes to express their thoughts without any concern for their position on their team, whether they'll get NIL deals or scholarships." The website also features athletic workouts that are accompanied by statistics that display racial disparities and inequities in the United States.
"It was great to see so many people willing to share their stories so that Black athletes going into college could see what we've gone through and maybe learn from us, or for other people looking in just to see what we might have gone through that doesn't get talked about often," Jack says.
Jack credits her parents, Amy Wechter and Osborne Jack, with instilling a love of swimming in her and supporting her through her development with the sport. Her mother, who was living in Barbados at the time, took an ocean swim every morning while she was pregnant with Jack, and had her in the water not long after she was born.
A state champion breaststroker at Scotia-Glenville High School in Scotia, New York, Jack chose Penn State because she wanted to be challenged academically – she is a marketing major and Spanish minor who is a Schreyer Scholar – and wanted to be similarly pushed in competition.
"I didn't want to be the fastest swimmer on the team," she says. "I didn't want to be the slowest swimmer on the team."
Jack says she is prone to second-guessing herself when it comes to swimming, but that her teammates have helped remind her that she belongs at this level and to keep her loose before meets; she recently returned to her high school habit of listening to music and dancing prior to races.
"In the end, I'm never going to remember what times I swam," she says. "I'll always remember my teammates."
Jack has been inspired by Olympic gold medalist freestyle swimmer Simone Manuel and by tennis legend Serena Williams for their achievements and their steadfastness in being their true selves, and by her younger sister, Tia, who "reminds me to do things out of love and not because other people expect me to do it." If she had advice for younger athletes, it would be to learn from the lessons that have helped her.
"I hope that I allow younger Black athletes to see me and realize that as someone who has kind of mentally struggled in my sport and outside my sport that it's OK to take a step back when you need it," she says, "and OK to realize when you might need help in your sport, help in academics, just in general that it's OK to ask for help and you don't need to push through everything you have on your plate all by yourself."
Jack hopes to swim for Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in the 2024 Olympics, but first she plans to graduate and then enroll in a one-year master's program in marketing. She aspires to work in marketing in the fashion industry – preferably sustainable fashion or athletic fashion – and hopes to be as "involved in my communities as I can be" wherever she winds up. As usual, she plans to lead by setting the example.
"Through my actions, asking people to be self-aware, and realize they could be more expressive of their own opinions and situations," she says. "And create the discussions that need to be had about social issues in this country."
