Purpose in a Pandemic

Just a few blocks north of the Oklahoma River, the first domino fell. Fans filed into Chesapeake Energy Arena for a mid-March, Wednesday night matchup between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Utah Jazz. The sequence of events that would transpire inside the arena over the next several hours deserves its own chapter in the sports history books.

Twenty-one miles south, on the University of Oklahoma campus, students were finishing midterm exams and preparing for their annual spring break exodus. The Sooner rowing team readied for its own trip to Chula Vista Elite Athletic Training Center in San Diego, where it would spend the week off from classes making final preparations for the spring season.

Back in Oklahoma City, the game had been abruptly put on hold just minutes before tipoff. Officials sent the teams back to the locker rooms. Seventy-eight minutes later, the NBA suspended its season. Jazz star Rudy Gobert had tested positive for COVID-19, triggering an unprecedented shutdown of the sports world, and, shortly after, much of everyday life.

"The fact that I get to work every day, and I get to help, it's given me a lot of purpose through the pandemic. Not many people have that option to have a purpose in all this, and I'm glad I was given this one."
- Serafina King

Two days later, Serafina King sat with her teammates in the OU Rowing Training Center. It was the morning of Friday the 13th, now 15 days before the Sooners were set to officially open the 2020 spring season.

OU head coach Leeanne Crain could read between the lines. Three regular season races and the Big 12 and NCAA championships had already been canceled. She knew it would be their last time together as a team.

"In our sport, it's not uncommon to have races rescheduled due to weather, but to have the entire season wiped out before it even began was tough news to share with a team so eager to get out on the racecourse," Crain said. "There was a lot of heartbreak, a lot of tears, a lot of hugs."

The training trip to San Diego wouldn't happen, the students wouldn't return to campus after spring break and it was the last week of sports as we knew them.

"It was devastating. That's the only word to describe it," King explained. "I just remember every single person on our team when Coach Crain was telling us what was going to happen, everyone was crying. There wasn't a dry eye in the room."

The news hit the junior especially hard. King, who swam competitively for 13 years before taking up rowing in 2018, wouldn't just be losing her second season with the Sooners, but she'd also lose invaluable training for what was soon to be her third Paralympic Trials.

"What the heck am I going to do? How am I going to train?," King asked herself.

In just a few weeks, however, training would be the least of King's worries. Instead, she'd be thrown into a critical role, playing her part to slow the spread of a global pandemic in America's second-largest city.

Serafina King

A Dream Postponed

At age 7, King joined her first competitive swim team at the recommendation of her doctor. She was born with a brachial plexus injury, resulting in muscle imbalances on her right side and a partially paralyzed right arm. The doctor told her mother, Tamara King, that Serafina would have scoliosis and suggested she try swimming to keep her back even.

"It gave her a range of motion that she never would've had because of the repetitive nature of all the strokes," said Tamara. "It forced her to use her arms in a way she never would've used them if she was doing a land-based sport."

King found herself at a disadvantage against able-bodied athletes, but, at age 12, she went to her first Paralympic event.

"It gave her a sense of belonging because she hated swimming at first — she absolutely hated it — because it was hard compared to someone [competing] with four fully-functioning limbs," Tamara continued. "All of a sudden, she was fast by Paralympic standards, so it gave her a place to belong, and then it also gave her a confidence boost."

Soon, Serafina's competitive nature took over, and she had a new goal in mind: Qualifying for the Paralympic Games.

"I was the biggest fan of Michael Phelps," she said. "I absolutely loved him, and I was obsessed with the work he had done and the fact that he had gone to so many Olympics just blew my mind. I grew up watching the opening ceremonies and the closing ceremonies, and I just wanted to be a part of that."

King took her first shot at those Paralympic aspirations at the age of 13, when she swam at the 2012 Paralympic Trials. While she was unable to secure a spot at the London Games, it was a big step toward entering international competition.

Not long after, she made her Team USA debut at the 2014 Para Pan-Pacific Championship, claiming bronze in the 100m backstroke. She later added a 400m freestyle bronze medal at the 2015 Para Pan-American Games.

"When you get to represent your country, it's just an incredible feeling. Making it to the Games would be an honor. It's been a dream since I was a kid."

In 2016, King, battling illness, again fell short of qualifying for the Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Shortly after the Trials, she was diagnosed with appendicitis and underwent an appendectomy. Even if she had made the squad, she would've been unable to compete.

Still only 17 years old, King knew she would have another opportunity for the next Games. But, as her career progressed and even as she set a pair of American Paralympic records, which still stand, something felt off.

"When I was 20, I decided to retire from swimming because I think I had very naive thoughts about the sport," King explained. "Every time I broke an American record, my coach would come up to me and say 'Which one are you going to break next?' I became obsessed with the idea of winning and less about if I was enjoying what I was doing."

So she turned to rowing, and she wanted to row for the right reasons. A transition from swimming to rowing is a common occurrence, and the shift comes with some natural adaptations.

"You have to understand water really well in rowing. You have to understand how you can manipulate it to do what you want, and swimmers have that skill already down," she said. "We understand the fastest way to move through water, so when I was put in a boat... I understood the concept and the movements already."

This time, the sport gave King a different kind of belonging. For the first time, she was on a level playing field.

"I think for her it was really eye-opening when she went to Oklahoma. She was like, 'This is the first time in my life where I'm just an athlete,' and that was huge to hear her say that," Serafina's mother said.

King adjusted quickly. In her first year, she helped the Sooners' second varsity four boat to a second-place finish at the 2019 Big 12 Championship.

During that first season, King's top priority was to earn a spot in the Sooners' first varsity eight boat. The Paralympics were no longer on her radar. But with success, she realized one more shot at the Paralympic Games might be viable, this time on the water rather than in it.

"Six months out from the actual games, I think, all of a sudden, that spark that had been there kind of dormant through 2012 to 2016 and now to 2020, that went blazing," Tamara King said. "The spark lit, reigniting that flame of fulfilling her dreams of representing the United States at the Games."

But along with the cancellation of Oklahoma's 2020 season came the postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Games. The COVID-19 pandemic simply posed too great of a health and safety risk to bring athletes and fans from around the world together in the summer. King would have to wait yet another year for her third Paralympic Trials.

With athletics on pause and the remainder of the semester moved online, King headed home to Los Angeles on March 18.

King 2v8

The Call to Duty

At 8 years old, King decided she wanted to be an LA County Ocean Lifeguard. At 18, she became one.

"I think there's a misconception that we sit around in towers and that it looks like 'Baywatch,'" King explained. "There's a lot that goes on behind the scenes that makes you love your job.

"I get to interact with people from all over the world, I get the adrenaline rush of going on rescues every single day. There's nothing to not love about the job that I have."

When she's not at school, she can be found lifeguarding at LA's most well-known beaches: Hermosa, El Segundo, Zuma, Venice, Malibu. During the summer, King is typically stationed at Santa Monica Beach.

"We're on the Pacific, where the water's cold and the waves are big," her mother explained. "They're the only first responders that take [layers] off to go in and rescue someone just based off their sheer physical ability and knowledge of the ocean, and that's a pretty hardcore thing."

A unit of the LA County Fire Department, the Ocean Lifeguards are often mobilized in disaster situations when resources are spread thin, most commonly during Southern California's infamous wildfire seasons. But this disaster was different.

On the first day of April, after several weeks back home, King received a phone call.

"I got a call from my captain, and he said show up at 0700 for work tomorrow, and he gave me a location... I found out what I'd be doing when I showed up."

She learned she would be heading up one of LA's new Project Roomkey task forces. The effort, launched by California Governor Gavin Newsom on April 3, is dedicated to providing LA's homeless population with protection from COVID-19 by securing thousands of hotel and motel rooms.

"My job is to put together these teams," King said. "It'll be security guards, nurses, disaster service workers... and we put them in the hotel, and we guide them on how to run these hotels. And then after that, we start bringing in people who are in shelters. If we have them on the streets and in shelters, it's going to spread a lot faster, so it will help us flatten the curve."

Over the next few weeks, King worked 12-hour shifts day after day.

Wake up at 6 in the morning, arrive at work at 7, run a morning debrief session, deliver meals to clients, intake more clients, which requires numerous safety and security steps, run an afternoon debrief session, oversee a shift change, take care of clients' medical and special needs, leave work at 7 p.m., eat dinner, do her laundry and go to bed around 10.

Then she'd do it all over again the next day.

"I'm being involved in the processes every day... and any problems go to me," King said of her role in the operation. "Outside of the hotel, I do have a fire chief and a fire captain that I report to, but in the actual hotel, everything has to go through me first."

The work was grueling, and difficult, and taxing. Although she was still getting eight hours of sleep at night, King battled exhaustion during the day while meeting the needs of the hotel residents and protecting 150 of the population's most vulnerable lives.

"Who gets to say they worked during COVID-19 managing a task force at a COVID hotel? This is one of those things where it just sounds unbelievable."

And don't forget: She's a college junior. King is grateful for understanding professors and faculty members who have been flexible with their coursework.

"Your brain is fried at the end of the day after having to do so much, so I would have about 30 minutes to myself each day at work, and I would take those 30 minutes to try and catch up on my schoolwork."

The toll was both physical and mental. King worried each day about being exposed to the dangerous virus and potentially bringing it home to her family. She also never knew what a single day might entail.

"There have been some really disturbing things that I've seen so far... some medical scares and things like that," she described. "But I'm trying to focus on the happier moments that I've shared."

Those included a lively Indiana Jones look-alike and a couple that cranked up 70s rock tunes each morning.

"It's just the best thing in the world. It puts you in the best mood for the day. There have been some really amazing moments with the people at this hotel."

Throughout it all, King made sure to stay focused on the mission at hand: protecting the community. The fire department's role was to get the hotel locations up and running before pulling back, and the team was successful. On May 15, King worked her final 12-hour shift of the crisis, after more than a month straight of service.

"As brutal as it is, because it is — it's absolutely brutal — I wouldn't take any of it back," she shared. "I'm exhausted. My feet hurt. I can't wait until I don't have to wear my uniform every single day with five-pound fire boots on. But this has been an absolutely incredible experience.

"Who gets to say they worked during COVID-19 managing a task force at a COVID hotel? This is one of those things where it just sounds unbelievable."

Serafina King

A Unique Perspective

She'll continue to work as a part of Project Roomkey throughout the summer, but, with the most demanding part of her crisis role behind her, Serafina King looks to resume her training with sights set on Tokyo 2021.

Her regimen will include eight-mile soft sand runs on the beach, workouts on a rowing machine and, hopefully, the resumption of her typical Ocean Lifeguard duties, if the Los Angeles beaches are allowed to reopen. She even hopes the one-year postponement may work to her advantage.

"I've only been rowing for two years, and the people I would be competing against for the spot on the team, they've been rowing for maybe 10 years," she explained. "They can't make as much progress as I can in a year. It's actually given me a really great opportunity to work really hard and improve significantly, and that'll give me a massive shot next year."

After all, King has already waited this long and given up so much. During her swimming days, she tested out of school to focus on training and competition.

"She gave up school," Tamara said. "She never did the things that high school students do. She never went to a football game. She never went to a prom. She gave it all up to be the athlete that can say she went to the Games."

So what's a little more waiting?

"The most amazing feeling in the world was putting my swim cap on that had the American flag and my last name on it," Serafina shared. "When you get to represent your country, it's just an incredible feeling. Making it to the Games would be an honor. It's been a dream since I was a kid."

Whether she makes the 2021 Games or not, her time as a Paralympic athlete has shaped her for the better. Over the last month, Serafina has poured her heart and soul into protecting a population all too often looked at as "different."

"When we were at a Paralympic event, she didn't see the differences," Tamara King said. "Someone might be like, 'Oh, that guy is missing a leg,' or, 'That girl's face is deformed on one side.' She doesn't see that... She just sees people for who they are on the inside, not what they're made up of on the outside, and I think that that is a really unique quality."

Reflecting on the recent circumstances, Serafina has made her own connections between her athletic career and what has become the new normal. Before joining the OU rowing program, she only knew individual competition. Becoming part of a team has given her an entirely new outlook.

"I think the beautiful thing about rowing is that it's so graceful when eight people can have such fluidity all at the same time, and that's something I really ended up appreciating after the last few months," she said.

It's that same teamwork, she's learned, that brings beauty and grace to everyday life, even in the most trying of times. King's perspective has shifted thanks to the people she's met, the people she's worked with, the people she's protected.

"What I've realized is that I don't have to stay positive, I just have to stay grateful," she said, holding back tears. "I need to appreciate what I've been given and what I've been doing and what I can do.

"I've been given this amazing gift to help other people [in LA], and when I'm in the boat I need to think I've been given this amazing gift to help my teammates go faster."

At the beginning of the spring season, Crain wrote a single phrase underneath a white board used to countdown to each race: "Everything we do every day matters." After the team meeting on Friday the 13th, she changed it: "Everything we DID every day MATTERED."

"I think we all left that day knowing there were greater challenges ahead and that each of us, in our own way, could play an important role in this humanitarian crisis, even if only in small gestures of kindness and compassion for a world in turmoil," Crain shared. "In a matter of days, Serafina chose to put into action that very compassion... She truly did something that mattered."

She just sees people for who they are on the inside, not what they're made up of on the outside, and I think that that is a really unique quality."
- Tamara King

At just 21 years old, King has given back to her community in a way many will never be able to say they have.

"I have grown up in LA my entire life... Anything I can do to help, I'm going to do," said a still-tearful King, thinking intently about what to say next. "It feels really weird, honestly... It honestly just makes me really happy in a very sad way. I'm just happy that I can do something.

"The fact that I get to work every day, and I get to help, it's given me a lot of purpose through the pandemic. Not many people have that option to have a purpose in all this, and I'm glad I was given this one."

When she's done chasing her lifelong Paralympic dream, King has a new career path in mind.

She wants to become a firefighter.

"The things that I find important in my life now are so different than the things I found important at the beginning. There's no doubt in my mind that my entire perspective on life has changed. All I've ever wanted to do was help others, and this has really opened my eyes to how many ways I could do that."

So when Serafina King returns to the water, she'll remember why she chose this path. It was never about winning or breaking records.

It's about those eight seats sliding in unison. It's about grace and fluidity. It's about doing her part.

For Serafina, it's about finding purpose in every stroke.

LA County photos courtesy of Kevin Graner.