Data and Drive

In competitive swimming, hundredths of a second can make the difference between moving from a heat to the finals or between medaling and finishing fourth.

Everything counts: your gear, your rhythm, your start. Swimmers spend hours perfecting the seconds between the whistle for "take your mark," the beep for “go,” their entry dive and first strokes. Mastery of that shaves time off a personal best.

Deaf swimmers have a clear disadvantage.

Carli Cronk (BBA ’28), a student-athlete on the University of Notre Dame swim team, knows this well. A competitive swimmer since childhood, she uses hearing aids but can’t hear those crucial sounds. 

“I have to use hand signals,” she said. “When I first started swimming, hand signals were not required, so officials were not required to know them. My coaches did hand starts for me for most of my early career.”

Cronk and her parents advocated to USA Swimming for mandating hand signals at meets. Strobe light starts are also required now. “Before competitions, I always have to go the extra length to make sure the officials know what I need and that the strobe light next to my block is working,” she said. “It's my normal, but to other people, it’s an extra step they don't have to take.” Cronk remembers a meet during her first year at Notre Dame where the strobe was malfunctioning, and the officials wouldn’t allow hand signals from her coaches.

“I was at a major disadvantage. I had to start with absolutely nothing.”

She approaches overcoming such obstacles with aplomb. In addition to rigorous coursework in her major of business analytics at the Mendoza College of Business, she’s coming off her second appearance in the NCAA championships, where she recently placed 10th in the 200 butterfly.

When she was 13, Cronk was the youngest swimmer at the 2018 Deaf World Championships. In 2022, she would go on to win 12 gold medals at the Deaflympics in Brazil, the most ever by an individual at a single game, and be named Sportswoman of the Year from the International Committee of Sports for the Deaf, Deaflympics’ governing body. The U.S. Swimming Federation also awarded her "most outstanding performance" and the 2022 Zorn award.

At the Deaflympics in Tokyo in November 2025, Cronk collected seven medals: five golds, a silver and a bronze. But for Cronk, success in the pool has always been about more than medals and records. 

"None of that matters if the team isn't like your family,” she said, which is what drew her to Notre Dame.

“I took a bunch of recruiting visits, and the team here was like nothing else,” she remembered.  “I'm a big body language reader and I could see how they all loved one another. There was just a cohesiveness I was looking for.”

Swimming is a solitary sport in many ways, and Cronk has mostly trained for individual, mid-distance events.

“You are staring at a black line for two to four hours a day, just swimming back and forth. It gets pretty mentally draining, especially after three 75-minute classes,” she said.

Though their pool’s underwater speakers pump in music to liven up the laps, Cronk says she can’t hear it. Chatting with teammates at the walls after each length helps. This year she competed in a four-person relay event for the first time at the ACC and NCAA Championships.

“That has been amazing. Being on that big NCAA stage with my teammates was special.” Cronk appreciates how well Notre Dame supports academics and athletics.

“Often you have to pick one, but here you can do both. The professors here have an understanding of a student-athlete's life. When I was in Tokyo for two and a half weeks, my professors made sure I was in the loop. I still did all my work, but they were very supportive.”

She is particularly excited about studying in Italy for three weeks this summer for the immersion course Innovation & Design Thinking. She and other students work in multi-national teams with leading design firms in Milan on client projects using ethnographic research skills to understand unmet consumer needs.

“It’s been really cool to see how you can take all this data and visualize it so people understand it.”

With two years ahead of business courses and swimming successes to motivate her, Cronk has a lot still to accomplish. “All your friends being at practice, laughing with them — that's what keeps me going,” she said. “You can have so many achievements in swimming, but I would not be here without my friends and my family supporting me.”