When I first moved to my city, I was a pretty unspectacular 13 year old girl, I’ve always been awkward so my parents thought it would be a good idea to get me to join a swimming club. When I first walked in I was a bit shocked there was people of all sizes, ready to swim and laughing but one girl really stood out from everyone and she was close to 300lbs. Anyway I kind of laughed in my head thinking she wouldn’t be able to swim. Turned out she was the best damn person in the team and her size didn’t even bother her swimming, she always came in 1st. Over the next few weeks I got to know her better, and the whole team. Her name is Nikki and she is the most wonderful and funny person I’ve ever known, we ended up being best friends and looked forward to our weekly swim. When we were in tournaments other teams would laugh and point at her, one boy in our team once nearly punched another teams boy for laughing at her, but calm as ever she just said “let them laugh, we’ll be laughing when I beat them in the pool”, and she did beat them.

Anyway, a few months back our coach left to move to New Zealand (good luck to him he was amazing!) and we got a new coach, she seemed nice at first, but slowly she started excluding people from doing events or would get them out of the pool ect, one of the people was Nikki, she’d always make under handed comments towards her “you’d be faster if you lost 200lbs and prettier”, “I can’t let you swim like that people will laugh at you”, “you can’t possibly be healthy how are you so big when you swim so much you must eat so much junk!”. At the end of every month we get a day when we just mess around and swim in bikinis, Nikki has this beautiful retro one with a high waist, she was wearing it and our new coach kicked her out the pool for being “indecent”, but the thing is all the girl wear similar clothes on this day. We found her later on after the lesson crying alone in a changing stall. This went on for a few months, always directed at her, slowly the other people who she was rude to quit and joined other swim teams, but not Nikki she always smiled but I knew it was upsetting her.

I’ve seen her reading this blog and I know she reblogs it all the time and I’m so happy to see that people are willing to combat this type of bullying!

After about a month of sitting out the coach kicked her off the team for “intimidation”, the only person in the team who was new was the coach and her daughter who both just seem to hate anyone not very thin.

Anyway Nikki, last sunday in practise everyone agreed that we are all going to quit this sunday coming up, all of us are quitting because we don’t want to be part of a team that you’re not welcome in. In-fact I’m inviting you to come to the pool with us on sunday because we are all quitting and then just going for a casual swim instead and going to have fun then a picnic afterwards.

Nobody deserves to be shamed because they are not what someone calls beautiful.

Not like it matters anyway our team would never be able to win anything without you! We all love you!

Mod note:

Not quite the sort of thing we usually publish, but so sweet I’m doing it anyway.