Mount Si champion swimmer earns prestigious scholarship

Mount Si swimmer Chase Goulart has seen his success in swimming result in a big honor.

By Rhett Workman • June 4, 2010 7:05 pm
Mount Si High School senior swimmer Chase Goulart competes last winter in the finals of the 500-yard freestyle event during the WIAA 3A boys state swim and dive championships at the King County Aquatic Center in Federal Way. Goulart will swim and study systems engineering this summer at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy.
Mount Si High School senior swimmer Chase Goulart competes last winter in the finals of the 500-yard freestyle event during the WIAA 3A boys state swim and dive championships at the King County Aquatic Center in Federal Way. Goulart will swim and study systems engineering this summer at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy.

Mount Si swimmer Chase Goulart has seen his success in swimming result in a big honor.

Goulart, who won a state title in March in the boys’ 200 meter individual medley at the state 3A boys’ swimming championships, recently signed with the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and will be swimming and serving his country for this branch of the military which handles security and management of international shipping channels and the exports and imports coming into the U.S. via those channels. To earn this honor he secured a nomination from 8th District Congressman Dave Reichert, then had to be picked to join the team by the school’s coach. The scholarship he earned was a full-ride and is worth over $200,000.

Goulart was thrilled. “When I found out that I was accepted, I was pretty excited about it all,” the swimmer said of his prestigious honor. As part of this scholarship, Goulart got a chance to meet and have a photo with Reichert, which took place last week. This, too, was exciting for the Wildcat senior. “That was pretty cool,” he said.

Goulart will report to school July 6, and will be required to serve 300 days with the Merchant Marines at sea while he is in school there. This could put him in some hot spots around the world, most notably Somalia, where pirates continue to create problems for marine traffic in major shipping corridors around the Horn of Africa and south end of the Arabian Peninsula. Before he is able to serve, however, he will go through six weeks of basic training, which will include among other things push ups and a lot of running. Goulart is expecting it not to be easy. “They say it’s going to be the most intense workout of anybody’s life,” he said, but he expects that his swimming experience will help him through this training.

“I think I will have a little bit of an upper hand over the rest of the people coming in,” Goulart said.

The academy is in New York State, and Goulart plans on majoring in systems engineering. The team competes in the NCAA’s Division III, which is the same division that schools such as Tacoma’s Pacific Lutheran, Oregon’s George Fox and Southern Oregon, and Walla Walla’s Whitman College compete in. These local colleges and universities have had or will have Wildcat graduates competing for sports teams next school year.