Warhawks remember swim and dive team member
By Daniel Schoettler
Sports Correspondent
The UW-Whitewater athletics community lost an important member of the swim and dive program last month in Spencer Twining. Twining was killed in a motorcycle crash on Sept. 8 in Waukesha County.
“I will always remember his unique sense of humor,” head coach Joel Rollings said. “He was very unique and accepting of other people.”
Rollings said Twining’s personality was fun to be around and he let others be themselves. Every day at practice he would go out of his way to make at least one person smile.
“Personally, I’m going to remember his positive energy the most,” sophomore Melanie Schaefer said. “That kid could put a smile on my face no matter what kind of a mood I was previously in.”
Rollings called him an exceptional student athlete. Twining was on a heavy course load at the university in addition to being a student athlete.
“He would be running back from practice to class to somewhere else,” Rollings said. “He carried the toughest schedule, but he was one of our scholar athletes.”
Schaefer said that Twining tried to teach her physics equations the first time she met him. She said she’ll always remember him as one of the smartest people she ever knew.
Rollings said that Twining was an excellent worker in an out of the water. He called him the “perfect embodiment” of what a student athlete should be.
“He had that mental toughness that you want to translate from sport into real life,” Rollings said. “He would leave practice exhausted, but he was mentally tough enough to know he had to study and be in the lab and work late sometimes and he accomplished so much in such a short amount of time.”
Most athletes will eat energy bars or drink Gatorade to get ready for an athletic event. Rollings said that wasn’t the kind of thing you’d see out of Twining.
Rollings and Schaefer recalled a swim meet in La Crosse where the team had to take two breaks during the meet.
“Spencer literally left the meet, bought a gyro,” Schaefer said. “He brought it back to the meet and ate it when he still had a race to swim.”
Rollings said Twining not only left the pool that day, but ran across the street to get the gyro. The coach said he asked him if it was going to affect his swimming and Twining said, “No, I’ll be fine.”
“The dude sure enough got up and did fine,” Rollings said. “It was like coaching a diesel engine, you could put anything in him and he still would run fast.”
Outside of the pool, Schaefer said she’ll remember Twining for being one of her favorite people to hang out with.
“He was like a breath of fresh air,” Schaefer said. “Whether it was lighthearted conversation or not, he was so honest and I appreciated that about him.”
