Jessie Cline is a gifted athlete and budding artist. Cline, a senior at Key School, will attend Davidson College in North Carolina on a swimming scholarship. The Annapolis resident also runs the Bay Ridge Triathlon once a year. And painting helps Cline relax when she’s got a championship swimming meet ahead.
“When there is stress from swimming and academics, it’s my release,” Cline explains. “I turn on music and paint for the whole class.”
Cline got inspiration to paint from her grandmother, Susan Cohen. Cohen did oil painting for about five decades. Cline has specialized in portraits and nature-focused oil paintings having done so since the fifth grade.
“I would bring home artwork from school and we would have conversations about it,” Cline says. “She would give me critiques and she still does…she thought I had something special. Every time I finish a piece now, she is very excited and wants to see it. When I got into high school, she pushed me to take art classes.”
Cline will paint up to six pieces a year and has completed 30 since she started. They hang in her home, Key school, and in her mother’s office. She also has her own website devoted to her work.
Cline found her niche in middle school thanks to art teacher Andrew Katz. She took right away to his style of painting.
“I had a really awesome teacher,” she says. “He made art feel more fun and alive for me. He was doing portraits of his favorite musicians and basketball players. He was bringing in pop culture into it to make it great and lively. I said, ‘Wow, I want to do this.’”
At Davidson, she will continue her involvement in the arts, painting in her free time and creating sculptures outdoors with an art club. But her main activity will be swimming at Davidson, where she’s majoring in pre-med with an eye toward being a dermatologist. She chose Davidson over Dartmouth and Richmond.
“I fell in love with Davidson,” says Cline, who carried a 3.6 grade point average at Key. “I wasn’t going there just to swim. I am going there to be a student as well as an athlete. The coaching staff really respects that. I am going to find a real comfort in the pool and classroom.”
Cline isn’t your typical championship swimmer for the year-round Naval Academy Aquatic Club (12 years). She’s 5-foot-3 and outworks opponents and teammates with grit, intensity, and determination.
“She is very tenacious and just never gives up,” Naval Academy Aquatic Club Coach Hilary Yager says. “Most swimmers are about six-feet tall. They are your typical great athlete. She’s tiny but mighty. Nothing holds her back.”
Participating at the National Club Swimming Association Junior Nationals twice in Orlando is the highlight of her career. She was workhorse at the meet, swimming in five events each time. Cline considers her best strokes to be 200-meter butterfly and 50 freestyle.
“When I go to these national-level meets, there are kids from all over the country,” she says. “I walked away from those meets and said to myself, ‘Look at all those amazing kids.’ I felt so motivated to do better.”
Cline holds three Naval Academy Aquatic Club records: 25 free (8-and-under; 14:29), 50 free (11-12; 25:50), and 200 butterfly (13-14; 2:05.96).
She also set individual school records at Key in the 100-yard fly (59:30) and 200 free (1:59.57) and won four individual Interscholastic Athletic Association of Maryland championships.
A huge part of her development came during the aquatic club’s grueling practice schedule. Swimmers train 15 hours across six days.
“I am pushing my body past what I thought were my limits,” Cline says. “In these work outs, you are swimming about 6,000 yards and you are learning how to bring your heart rate up to insane levels and hold it there. I am hyper-focused on all the little things I need to do to make a swim technically perfect.”
Yager adds, “She is one of our hardest workers every single night.
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