Less than two years after snapping her spine in a bus crash that killed two teammates, Haley Scott was ready to dive into the University of Notre Dame pool again.
She splashed into the water to the cheers of not just classmates, family and fellow swimmers, but also the state trooper who responded to the accident scene in January 1992, nurses from the hospital where she healed and the mother of one of the young women who died.
Defying doctors' predictions that she would never walk - let alone swim - again, on Oct. 29, 1993, Scott posted the best time of her life in the 50-yard freestyle and won the heat.
"The most exhilarating feeling for me was not the race but the start," said her former coach, Tim Welsh, who broke a rib in the crash. "The moment she left the block, I thought, 'My God, she did it.' "
Today, Haley Scott is Haley Scott DeMaria, a wife and mother of two in Annapolis. Her book about her emotional and physical recovery, What Though the Odds, co-written by Bob Schaller, is set to hit bookstands Monday under the auspices of USA Swimming, the sport's national governing body.
The book is meant to be a guide on how to emerge from tragedy, not just another beat-the-odds story, Scott DeMaria said.
"Tragedy will affect everybody in their lives to some extent," said Scott DeMaria, 34. "I could not have come out of this without my community."
She rebuffed earlier attempts to tell her tale. For years, she was not ready to relive the night that took the lives of fellow freshmen Meghan Beeler and Colleen Hipp.
The women's swim team was headed back from a meet in Chicago and was just a few miles from home when its bus skidded on an icy highway during a blizzard, struck a culvert and flipped over. Scott climbed out an open window and walked several feet in the snow before clasping her back in pain and collapsing, said teammate Susan Bohdan Walton.
Walton, who suffered whiplash in the accident, stayed with Scott until help arrived an hour later. When Scott complained that she couldn't feel her legs, Walton told her that the coldness of the snow had probably made her feel numb.
In fact, the snow might have prevented permanent paralysis by staving off swelling in her spine, doctors later told Scott. Doctors initially prepared her for life in a wheelchair and the possibility of never bearing children. Her fortunes changed, however, and Scott began a long road to recovery. It included more surgeries when the steel rods supporting her back broke apart and punctured her skin.
