Three Years After Taylor Winnett Quit Her ‘Big-Girl Job,’ Her Para Swimming Career Continues to Reach New Heights

Taylor Winnett can pinpoint the moment she decided to prioritize Para swimming and commit to training for the sport at its highest level.

It was 2022. She had just graduated from college and landed her first “big-girl job,” complete with a company car, phone and computer. But with the Para Swimming World Series in Indianapolis approaching, she hadn’t accrued enough time off to go, and missing the meet would mean missing her chance to get internationally classified and take the next step in her athletic career.

“I remember I talked to my boss and said I need less than two days, maybe 14 or 15 hours unpaid time off, and that I really need to go to this meet,” she said. “They said based on our policies we can’t let you go. So I talked to my husband and said, ‘Should I quit my job?’”

Spoiler alert: she quit.

The 26-year-old from Hershey, Pennsylvania, is now a Paralympian and just this year made her world championships debut in Singapore. One big thing she’s learned about competing at this level: it’s hard.

“I think a misconception a lot of people have is that the Paralympics is not on the elite level like the Olympics are, and it is,” Winnett said. “I genuinely worked so hard and honestly barely made the Paris team. I was not a superstar. I made it by the skin of my teeth, and it’s hard. It’s competitive. It really taught me discipline throughout the quad.”

This past year has been a “whirlwind of surprises” for Winnett. Her husband is a sergeant in the Army and received orders for El Paso, Texas, where she found a new coach and joined the Sun City Masters swim team. Then, at the end of January, Winnett needed her appendix removed. Although it’s a routine procedure, Winnett already had a lot of scar tissue around the stomach from previous surgeries. She also has Ehlers–Danlos syndrome, so she doesn’t heal as fast.

With the lone selection event for the 2025 world championships in April, Winnett feared she wouldn’t be in race shape in time. She remembered how it felt to miss the cut for the 2023 worlds team.

“I was at the house getting ready to go to the pool, and I just laid on the couch and cried,” she said. “It was really hard.”

Although Winnett went on to the 2023 Parapan American Games and was the most decorated U.S. athlete there, she was ready for her shot at the last big meet still missing from her resume.

Rehab was slow and often frustrating. Winnett spent time at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Center in Colorado and said she wouldn’t have been able to do as well as she did without the sports medicine staff there, but still she was limited in what they would allow her to safely do.

“I’d be told, ‘You can swim 800 meters today,’ which is nothing for me,” she said. “And I’d have pain even though I wasn’t doing flip turns, I wasn’t kicking, I was swimming with a snorkel. Then I’d be told I had to take longer out of the water. I’d have to stop. And I’d say, ‘What do you mean? I’m swimming less than 20 minutes a day!’”

Winnett is a Christian, and she remembers thinking maybe it just wasn’t in God’s plan for her to compete at worlds this year. But when the team was announced in May, she was granted a medical discretionary slot.

Winnett made it to Singapore in September and opened with one of her top events, the 400-meter freestyle.

“It was my first race, and it was basically the first time racing this year when I was actually in shape and not coming off surgery,” she said. “I was thinking that my country used a discretionary slot on me, and I needed to prove to them that it was the right decision. I didn’t want to put too much pressure on myself, because I do get race anxiety, but I knew I worked really hard on my freestyle this year.”

Despite battling through issues with her right arm throughout the summer, Winnett dropped three seconds off her best time and went under 4:50 for the first time after being stuck at 4:52 for a couple of years. She got fourth place in the S10 classification.

“I think some people thought I might have been upset because I missed the podium, but I had my best time by three seconds, and I was eighth in Paris,” said Winnett, who dropped time in two other events as well. “I was relieved.”

Things are up in the air for Winnett for 2026. She and her husband are ready to start their family, so Winnett’s leaving a lot of doors open. But the path she chose when she quit her “big-girl job” three years ago is one that’s still unfolding.

“I’d love to go to L.A. (in 2028),” she said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty, but we’ll see. I plan to stick around.”

Karen Price is a reporter from Pittsburgh who has covered Olympic and Paralympic sports for various publications. She is a freelance contributor to USParaSwimming.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.