Jamie SarkonakProgram: Business 1 (in his 4th year tho)
Hometown: Yellowknife, Northwest Territories
Team: Swimming
What made you come to Edmonton?
Honestly, the swimming program really drew me. And my parents both graduated from the U of A in Pharmacy, so it was a family decision also.
What’s the biggest difference between here and there?
It’s cold in Yellowknife. This is pretty tame.
How’d you get into swimming?
I didn’t like skating, and hockey is king up north. So I just decided to go the opposite and swim.
Why did you stick with swimming over the years?
It’s a love hate thing. We don’t know why we don’t stop swimming, no one really knows. There’s not a lot of glory or money in it, and we pretty much spend most of our time looking at a black line at the bottom of a pool. I don’t know. We do it to continuously improve and that’s a good thing?
What’s it like to compete on our team?
It’s really good, we have a very good sense of family on the team. We all know each other, we all joke around, we all hang out. We all went to Halloween together.
Is there any moment in your university swimming experience that stands out?
When someone does something they make a time, or some sort of qualification they didn’t expect they would do that weekend because they were feeling bad or they didn’t have it in them, and then all of the sudden they just do it. I love that. That feeling is amazing. Like, no one expected you to win a medal, or no one expected you to make finals and then you just did it.
Do you have any examples of that happening?
Our relay last year at (the CIS Swimming Championships) won the 4 x 100m Medley. We were fourth going into that — we were expected to come fourth. And we beat UBC, U of T and U of C. And we hadn’t done that since the 1970s. We went crazy. That was a good moment. Home run, it was like the Jays winning,
