Carli Cronk’s life has revolved around her record-setting swimming career ever since she joined a competitive summer swim league at the age of 4, but another element of her life has been with her since birth. She is deaf.
A rising sophomore from San Antonio, Texas, Cronk was born with sensorineural hearing loss. It can affect the inner ear or the auditory nerve — the pathway connecting the inner ear to the brain — making it difficult to hear and understand sounds. The cause is unknown.
To communicate, Cronk wears hearing aids and relies further on lip reading. Yet while deafness is part of who she is, it does not hold her back. Whether standing on the pool deck or walking to classes, she is constantly talking to people around her. She knows American Sign Language but is not fluent in it. She prefers speaking with others.
“I may be deaf, but that doesn’t mean I can’t talk. It doesn’t mean I don’t like to talk,” she says. “Sometimes when people learn that you’re deaf, they’re like, ‘Oh, she won’t be able to have a conversation, because she won’t be able to understand me.’ But I want to have a conversation. I love to talk to people.”
Cronk’s childhood in the pool became the cornerstone of a career built on setting records. In 2019, when she was 13, she won three medals at her first World Deaf Championships. During the 2022 Summer Deaflympics in Brazil, she set three deaf world records in women’s swimming as well as the record for most gold medals — 12 — at a single summer games.
With more than 25 international medals to her name, Cronk is no stranger to the podium or to seeing WR — world record — next to her time on the scoreboard.
She is quick to acknowledge everyone who has supported her, especially her teammates, family, others who have cheered her on. “Yes, I’m good at this,” she says, ”but also, I didn’t just get to do it on my own. It was the people who helped me.”
Watching two of her three siblings swim competitively at the collegiate level, she wanted to do the same. She visited Notre Dame to determine whether it would be on her list of potential colleges, but she had low expectations. After the trip, she knew exactly where she wanted to spend her college years. She enrolled last fall as a business analytics major.
In classrooms where a professor uses a microphone and slides, Cronk employs a transcription service named Ava that provides live captions to help her understand what the professor is saying. Elsewhere, she relies on a peer note-taker.
Outside the classroom, she has found the culture on the swim team just as welcoming as it was during her pre-college visit. And competing for the Irish, she soon started rewriting history.
This past January marked Cronk’s breakout moment at Notre Dame. On the first day of the Tim Welsh Classic at Rolfs Aquatic Center, she shattered the school’s oldest record, posting a time of 4:07.63 in the 400-yard individual medley and surpassing the mark set in 2014 by Irish legend Emma Reaney ’15.
A second school record came at the ACC Championships in February, when she swam the 500-yard freestyle in 4:42.59.
“All the training and the hard work that led up to this — and I’m not done yet — but at that moment, I was like, ‘It’s all worth it,’” Cronk says. “It just gives you a little validation . . . that I am a good swimmer, and I can do this.”
Collegiate races begin with an electronic tone and a strobe light. When competing, Cronk is aided by an official’s hand signals, which indicate to her when to step on to the starting block and take her mark. The strobe tells her when to enter the water.
Chris Lindauer, who coached the Irish during Cronk’s freshman year, says having a swimmer like Cronk elevates the team. “She comes in and wants to work for it and grind, and understands the ladder of progression to get there,” he says. “Others see that, feel that and want to ride that journey with her.”
“Carli . . . pushes everyone in the set, and it makes you a better person,” says teammate Hollie Widdows, also a rising sophomore.
As Cronk continues her collegiate swimming career, she remains a passionate advocate for deaf awareness. At a pool party with a young girl who is deaf, Cronk reassured her that it was OK to remove her hearing aids and enjoy the water. Such experiences inspire her to keep using her voice to promote awareness, which she plans to do even when her competitive swimming days are over.
“It’s not something to hide; it’s not something to hold you back,” Cronk says. “I’m hoping other people are like, ‘I can push myself and be out there and try.’”
Cooper VanDriessche is a rising junior from North Liberty, Indiana, who is majoring in film, television and theater with minors in journalism, marketing and Italian.