Words by 'Birds: Chocolate chipits and swimming with a frenemy

Erin Assman and Tera Van Beilen are both fifth year UBC students and Thunderbirds who will be graduating this spring. Erin just competed in her last swim meet and Tera is looking to compete in her second Olympic games this summer in Rio.

Flashback five years. If you told us we would go to the same university, we may have believed you. If you told us we would be teammates, we may have believed you. If you told us we would be roommates and best friends, we would have said, “HELL NO.”

Swimming is a small world — you know most of the people you race against. We raced against each other basically our whole lives, one of us just narrowly beating out the other for the win. At the beginning of high school, we started swimming in the same group for the Oakville Aquatic Club in Oakville, Ontario. At the beginning, we were friends — we had to be. Club swimming means your group is your built-in friends. You celebrated birthdays, Christmas and just about every other major holiday and occasion with them. We moved through high school and began to find our own voices. This is where we started to butt heads. It would be polite to say that we weren't the fondest of each other. From locker room banter to our individual competitive desire for attention, we never saw eye to eye.

As high school started to come to a close, university decisions were upon us. We were both great swimmers and could have chosen almost any school in the United States with a full ride. Instead, we both made the bold decision to stay in Canada and coincidentally both choose to attend UBC and become a beloved Thunderbird. We became the talk of the town. “Hey, did you hear Tera and Erin both chose UBC? How will their UBC teammates choose sides?” “How is Vancouver going to handle these two big personalities?” “Are you SURE that’s the best decision for you?” We replied to these questions with slight hesitation, not sure ourselves how exactly this new arrangement was going to work out.  

September of our rookie year hit — we were cordial, of course. It was always nice to see a familiar face in passing, but honestly we had no desire to actually hang out. The occasional dinner with our fellow rookie — Rebecca Terejko — at the Vanier Caf was about as close as we got. At this point, you may be thinking, “I don't get it. They're teammates, how did they not see each other 10 times a week?” We had different training schedules since Tera was training towards the Olympics at the National Training Centre and Erin was training with the varsity team. This was the kind of setup that we had hoped for when we originally both accepted our offer to UBC.

Our first year flew by and we were then left with the decision of who we were going to live with for our second year. Our original living arrangements fell through and as life sometimes goes, we were forced to make the best out of a “bad” situation. Tera Van Beilen and Erin Assman of Oakville, Ontario make the conscious decision to live together. Here's our story.

Through the eyes of Erin:

It was literally the day before we had to have our roommate preferences chosen. I had no one on my request list. To say I was stressed would be an understatement. It wasn't that I didn't want to meet new people, I did and always do. When you're training 30 hours a week for an extremely demanding sport, you don't exactly want your roommate to be having a party until 2 a.m. when you have practice at 5 a.m. I knew Tera, Rebecca and Heather MacLean were planning on living together. They were the perfect fit for each other — all very focused on swimming, not huge partiers and they all loved peanut butter. I gathered the courage to Facebook message the three of them and make the request to live with them. To my surprise, they messaged me back with a yes.

Again, Tera and I became a hot topic. LIVING TOGETHER?! Were we crazy? My parents, sister and friends were extremely worried. They knew the history between Tera and I and they really just couldn't see how this living arrangement could ever work out for the best. I think they had visions of us getting into a huge fight ending in strangling each other over whose cookies were better. Side note: we both make freaking fantastic cookies.  

We moved into our apartment in Gage Towers about a month after that fateful day and began to realize that this arrangement could really work. A few weeks into living together, Tera came up with our infamous name of “Core Four” — let's just say it involved a little alcohol, a parking lot rooftop and the most wonderful day of the year. To be completely honest, I wasn't the most fond of the name to start — I thought it was kind of cheesy. Yet as time went on, it became our identity, our namesake and just who we were. From then on, everyone knew us as Core Four — our coaches, members of other teams, our family. Heck, one of our teammates even got shirts made for us with “Core Four” splashed across the front and #nailedit on the back!

For the most part, living with these girls has been rainbows, butterflies and chocolate chipits, but there have been difficult times. In case you were wondering, Tera did make the Olympics she was training for in first year. As did Heather. This was part of the reason why I was originally so nervous about living with the two of them. I am a good swimmer — don't get me wrong, you have to be in order to be on the UBC’s swim team— but I’m not an Olympic-level athlete. I am completely okay with this. It gives me a little more freedom to do other things that are important to me like being social (athlete-only events are the bomb). In living with Heather, Tera, and Rebecca, I was afraid of being judged, about coming home late while everyone else was asleep, about not eating the right things, about not being as smart as the other girls and most of all, I was afraid of not being fast enough to be friends and roommates with these outstanding girls. It sounds silly, all of these things I was afraid of, and I'm sure Core Four would think I was out of my mind in saying these things. That is what's the best part about living with these girls, they have always been my biggest fan. That is something that will never change no matter where we live.

As told by Tera: 

The fact that my past frenemy became my roommate was an idea that I never thought would become reality.

Core Four consisted of four very different personalities, but we all embraced it each person for who they were. This is why I think we worked so well together. They do say opposites attract. I was known for the weird creations I made in the kitchen, my aggressively loud talking voice, always leaving the cupboards open and constantly have a good story to share or having a ridiculous story told about me.

Let’s be honest, I wouldn’t consider myself the cleanest member of Core Four. With that being said, I’m sure I wasn’t always the easiest person to live with, but I definitely made life interesting. Erin, on the other hand, had her moments as well. She was always Ms. Organized, is deathly allergic to peanut butter (which happens to be my favourite food), would daily leave her frying pan on the stove and has always been more mature than me. These were some of the things that drove me crazy about Erin, but somehow became the things that I love about her.

Something we learned very quickly was how to pick our battles. Like all relationships, it's about give and take. Passive-aggressive dry erase board notes or harsh text messages were not the answer. Living with a person in limited space, you quickly learn how to better conduct yourself and get along with someone who may very well be your opposite. Erin is one of the best listeners I know and I don’t think that any of our tiffs lasted longer than a couple hours because we able to communicate, compromise and cuddle our disputes away. Through our differences, we challenged one another because we really have wanted the best for each other.

We truly cared about each other’s lives. Every time we saw one another we would ask, “How was your practice?” “Did you have a good day?” “Whatcha making for dinner?” Our tiring days would often catch up to us, but praise the Lord for the our three favourite cable channels — TLC, Food Network and the Women’s Channel. We wouldn’t have survived the week without them along with our unlimited stashes of chocolate chips. And then there were the times that all four of us would congregate in our living room and catch up on each others lives. From tears of sadness that somehow always turned into tears of laughter, we could easily spend several hours chatting before looking at the clock and seeing 10:00 p.m. — time to pack it in, up in 7 hours for practice! That’s when you know you’re living in a swimmer house. Lights off and in bed at 10:30 p.m. AT THE LATEST.

Caring for someone takes time — friendship and love doesn’t happen instantly. Good friends evolve with you and thanks to Erin, we have seen each other grow into women that we are proud of. She became the much needed “mother of the household.” She has always kept me accountable for my actions, made me feel accepted and valued for who I am and has become my “go-to” person for advice along with supporting me in all my crazy endeavours. It wasn’t always be easy, but it was totally worth it.

Thanks to UBC, we became besties and have no regrets.

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