Two USMS Members in MISHOF 2024 Class

In early October, the International Swimming Hall of Fame announced eight individuals would be joining the prestigious Masters International Swimming Hall of Fame’s 2024 induction class. Two USMS members—Puget Sound Masters member Charlotte Davis and Sarasota Sharks Masters member Diann Uustal—are part of this elite class of athletes and contributors from around the world.

Charlotte Davis

This isn’t Davis’s first Hall of Fame nod; the 74-year-old Washington native was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame as an honor coach in 2014 for her laundry list of accomplishments in and contributions to the sport of synchronized swimming in the U.S.

Davis says her older sisters introduced her to synchronized swimming when she was very young, and she eventually joined a team in Washington. She excelled and eventually moved to California to join the reigning national champions, the Santa Clara Aquamaids. She competed there for a few years and earned a national championship in 1970. A year later, she returned home to start her own team in Seattle.

“My team got better and better,” she says, and when it was announced that synchronized swimming would make its Olympic debut at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, she was coaching the top two synchro swimmers in the United States, Tracie Ruiz and Candie Costie.

At the time, there were only two synchro events in Olympic competition—a solo and a duet—and Davis’s swimmers nabbed both qualifying spots for American athletes that year while Davis was tapped to be the head Olympic coach. Ruiz and Costie won gold in the duet and Ruiz scooped up a second gold in the solo event.

That success led to Davis being hired as a national team coach and she eventually became the national team director. She also served as head Olympic coach for each Games between 1984 and 2000, when she retired from coaching.

Throughout much of that fantastic journey, Davis was quietly logging laps.

“I always liked to swim,” she says, and one day back in 1987 while swimming laps at her local pool, a Masters coach approached and asked whether she’d ever considered competing in Masters swimming. She gave it a try and straight away, she was hooked. “The people were really fun," she says. "It’s good exercise, and we had a great social group. I felt like I really fit.”

She soon found she had a knack for winning, too, thanks to all those years as a synchronized swimmer. “Synchro is very difficult," she says. "Going from synchro to swimming, I think I had an advantage because I had such good feel for the water.” Plus, she’d spent untold hours training with pool workouts and lots and lots of kicking.

“Consequently, I was pretty good at all four strokes,” she says, which set her up to be a highly versatile competitor when she transitioned into Masters swimming.

Davis has set a staggering 91 individual USMS records and 37 AQUA (formerly FINA) Masters world records, largely in freestyle and IM events. In the year 2000, she became the first female Masters swimmer over age 50 to break a minute in the 100 free.

Davis has two children and five grandchildren. Her first husband passed away in 2009. But in 2019, she married one of her Masters lanemates. Today, she splits her time between Arizona and Washington, and she and her husband still swim together regularly. Though Davis has been facing some health issues recently, she’s looking forward to ramping her training back up to pursue future Masters Swimming records.

“I really never want to give up the sport,” she says. “I want to just keep going and see how far I can go.

She adds that her life in the water has been a blessing: “I’ve been really blessed that I’ve had synchro and Masters swimming in my life because just a lot of great things have happened because of it. I feel like I owe a lot to God who’s provided the opportunities and the talent to pursue something I love. I would just like to thank Him for being in my life.”

Diann Uustal

Diann Uustal, 78, of Sarasota Sharks Masters, has given much of herself to swimming over the years, but learning that she would be included in this year’s induction class came as a surprise. “I had tried to earn it, and I’m just very blessed to be in that illustrious company,” she says. “I’m still not quite believing it.”

But for avid Masters swimming watchers, her inclusion in this elite group isn’t much of a shock; Uustal has set a whopping 140 lifetime pool individual USMS records and 43 AQUA (formerly FINA) Masters world records, largely in freestyle and backstroke events.

And she’s done all this despite several setbacks and a serious medical condition that has created significant physical challenges to her swimming longevity.

First in this long line of obstacles was a bad car accident in 2003. The impact damaged her spinal cord and her doctors didn’t think she’d ever walk or race again. But she proved them wrong, using swimming to rehab the injury.

However, in 2008, a slip-and-fall on a wet floor led to a fractured arm and shoulder. She also ripped all three hamstrings on one leg.

As terrible as these injuries were—not to mention the several grueling surgeries she underwent to fix the damage—they all added up to another diagnosis with even farther-reaching implications: Uustal has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

This rare genetic disorder affects connective tissues, bones, and other organs, leading to hypermobility in the joints, stretchy skin, high blood pressure, and heart issues, among other problems. It can also cause significant pain throughout the body and cause life-threatening complications.

But Uustal has accepted the diagnosis with grace and continues to use the water for healing, both physical and spiritual. “I’m absolutely a phoenix,” she says of her rising from the ashes each time to soar again.

She first learned to swim when she was about 5 years old in Rhode Island. Her grandmother, Ruth Coburn, was a renowned open water swimmer during the mid-century heyday of the sport, “and she taught me to swim," Uustal says. "Without her taking me everywhere as a kid, I wouldn’t have had anyone supporting me. My parents were busy with other kids, but my grandmother devoted herself to me. Her last race was the first day I won a race."

Though she didn’t swim in college—this was prior to the passage of Title IX when opportunities for women to compete were extremely limited—Uustal enjoyed the water. “For me, it’s absolutely a positive addiction, and it has been since I was a child," she says.

A nurse with a doctoral degree in medical ethics, Uustal has taught and lectured all over the country. But in the water is where she feels “liberated and at peace," she says. "I know it’s great exercise and all that stuff, but for me, it’s much more emotional and transformative. I love it.”

She says swimming orders her day but also gives her an outlet to challenge her limits. It’s also intensely social. “I like being with my friends and the fun of suffering with all your teammates,” she says. She hopes to continue competing indefinitely and is quietly targeting a bunch more records when she crosses into the 80–84 age group. 

In reflecting on her forthcoming induction into MISHOF, Uustal credits the support she’s received from loved ones over the years: “Everybody says swimming is a team sport, and I think they’re thinking about relays. But there’s nothing I could have been lucky enough to accomplish if it wasn’t because of everybody else in my life that’s given a chunk of their time and a piece of their hearts.”

For example, she says the love, support, and sacrifice of her husband, Tom, has made all the difference. “He’s given up his time. We’ve even moved so I could swim on a good Masters team with great people,” she says. He attends all her meets and she says, “I can hear his whistles at me anywhere I go.”

Together, she says, they’ve learned that she’s capable of so much, even when it’s difficult. “My attitude is adversity is kind of my only opportunity to show what I’m made of. It’s not the gold medals or the digits on the scoreboard. It’s what you did to get there that really counts.”