Out of the Pool: Emily Brunemann Klueh on Social Work, the Paralympics and Finding Love at a Swim Meet

Emily Brunemann Klueh; Photo Courtesy: Peter H.Bick

Out of the Pool: Emily Brunemann Klueh on Social Work, the Paralympics and Finding Love at a Swim Meet

Emily Brunemann Klueh didn’t know quite how long her swimming journey would last. But as she neared the end, she knew what she wanted to do next.

Brunemann Klueh was a standout swimmer at the University of Michigan, the 2008 Big Ten Swimmer of the Year and an NCAA champion in the 1,650 freestyle. That success set the stage for a long national team career in open water.

While at Michigan, she worked with the university’s sports psychologists, which she credits with some of her success. Athletics was an important part of her life, and she wanted to help young athletes find that same joy in sports.

Emily Brunemann Klueh

Five years after graduating with her master’s degree in social work, she’s working for the Wolverines’ athletic department, as well as her own private practice. Her reputation earned a trip to Tokyo this summer as the USOPC’s first mental health officer. She lives in Ann Arbor with her husband, Michael Klueh, an NCAA champion at Texas and World Championships relay gold medalist who is an orthopedic surgery resident. The couple is expecting their second child.

Brunemann Klueh has a unique viewpoint on athletic achievement. A self-described late bloomer, the native of Kentucky kept improving into her mid-20s. She didn’t have massive career expectations as a teenager. Her ability to take each accomplishment as it came is part of the toolkit she helps equip clients with as they navigate the physical and mental pressures of performance.

“If you had asked me going into college if I would be a professional athlete for six years after I graduated from undergrad, I would’ve thought you were crazy,” she said. “That was never on my mind. That was never on my plan. So I think I just had a really unique outlook when it came to swimming because I was able to see things as a new opportunity and something fun and tried to look at it each year instead of every four years.”

Brunemann Klueh chatted recently with Swimming World about her work, the chance to work with Paralympians and how she and Michael met at the 2008 U.S. Olympic Trials.

(Interview has been edited and condensed.)

Swimming World: What attracted you to this work?

Emily Brunemann Klueh: What drew me to being a clinician is that I was interested in mental health as well sports performance-oriented issues, and I worked with one of our counselors here at Michigan when I was a student-athlete and found that incredibly beneficial. It helped me through a lot of different struggles and so I decided from there, that I wanted to help people. When I graduated from undergrad, I didn’t know what that actually meant when I said I wanted to help people, but it kind of evolved because I swam professionally for a little while, and when I was really knowing when I was going to retire from my sport, I really took a deeper dive into what meant a lot to me and where I could make an impact, and that’s what drove me to social work. I did a lot of research on trying to figure out which route I wanted to take, and for me, this work, the education and the values and the ethics of social work just really fit my personality and what I wanted to do with my career. I went back to school and got my degree and I always knew I wanted to work with student-athletes because athletics was a passion of mine. At the time, I wanted to work with student-athletes – and now I also own my business and private practice and I work with a variety of athletes, from younger to professional – so I was fortunate enough when I was going through my master’s program to have the resources here at Michigan and know that we have clinicians in the athletic department already embedded, and I reached out to them and asked if they would take me on as an intern, and they agreed. Then it was always right time, right place, because as I was graduating, a position opened up in the athletic department that I was able to apply for and got.

SW: I’m curious if you use your past and your experience as an elite athlete in how you approach working with clients?

EBK: There’s always these lines when we talk about professionalism, and especially as a clinician, there’s this idea that we can’t disclose anything about ourselves because it isn’t about us, which is accurate to a point. But we’re also human as well, and I think being able to find those areas that you can relate to those that you work with, and not that you have to, but I have found a lot of athletes feel comfortable knowing that I have experienced a lot of similarities that they’ve experienced. Not that it’s ever been the exact same situation or same story, but they know that I get it. And that, a lot of athletes have found comfort in.

SW: Since you work with athletes in a variety of sports, are there certain challenges you see across all sports or are there some that you see particular to swimmers?

EBK: There’s always across the board, especially working in a college environment, the adjustment to college is really challenging: new demands, new pressures, new expectations. Helping individuals work through some of those struggles is pretty consistent across the board. Some people manage it better than others. I think one of the unique aspects is, I feel like every sport has its own culture, and so being able to work with multiple different sports, I’ve been able to understand their culture better and be able to then apply that to how I work with individuals from those different sports. I obviously understand the swimming culture very well, so that makes it a little bit easy. But some of the other sports have been fun expanding my viewpoint on what their sport does, the innerworkings, the culture within, the type of individuals, all of that kind of stuff have been fun being able to learn and being able to work with people differently.

SW: What was the experience of getting to go to Tokyo this summer like, and what has it been like to work with Paralympians specifically?

EBK: Being at the Paralympic Games was incredible. It was an amazing opportunity. … There has never been anybody in this role before. I know there’s a lot of sports psychologists that works with the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic programs. But when it comes to straight mental health, this is the first time they’ve ever had mental health officers at the games. So to be able to be a part of something that was new and groundbreaking, the athletes really appreciated it, and it was just fun being in that environment.

SW: At the Olympics this summer, there was so much talk about mental health around Simone Biles and the “gold or bust” mentality that some people read into the Games for the Americans. Is that weight of expectations something you see young athletes struggling with, and do you have thoughts on how those conversations were framed this summer?

Emily Brunemann Klueh at 2013 U.S. Nationals; Photo Courtesy: Peter H. Bick

EBK: It’s a very challenging question, because I think everybody handles things so differently. I think across the board, pressure and expectation are something that every athlete has to a manage and deal with because that’s part of the nature of sport. Quite honestly, it’s no different than having a job. They are expectations and pressures to do your job to a certain degree or a certain level, and that’s the same thing that’s true for athletics. I think the hard part is, especially when you get into the professional world or when you get into the Olympic world and Paralympic world, you’re in a very public-facing environment. And so I think a lot of times, it’s more about managing the publicity of that vs. the actual pressure itself. Because everybody deals with pressure every day in their job or in what they do. It’s just talked about differently, expressed differently. I think the other unique caveat to athletes is that not only are they physically exhausted with just the training and the workload and all of that, but they’re also mentally exhausted from a lot of these things that we’re talking about – from the pressure, from the demands, from life outside of sport, all of those things. I think from a younger age, it’s developing skills to be able to navigate and manage the natural pressure and stress that comes with performance while reminding of the joy of the fun and what’s important to that individual when it comes to participating in what they’re doing.

SW: Do you see any parallel for you personally? By any measure your career was fantastically successful, but I take it the Olympics was probably the end goal and that didn’t happen. Is there a way that you’ve evolved over the years in how you view your accomplishments?

EBK: It took me a long time to get to the point where I didn’t look at the Olympics as the end all, be all of my identity or how I defined myself as an athlete. I think I also was in a different position than many people: I continued to improve as I got older, and I feel like you don’t see that a lot, especially in distance female swimming. So I think for me, because I didn’t have the expectations when I was younger of going to the Olympics because I wasn’t a phenom when I was a teenager, I managed the pressure and stress a little bit differently because I continued to improve as I got older and I looked at everything as a new opportunity and something that was new and exciting. As I got better and better in my career, I obviously had the end goal of making it to the Olympics because that’s when I finally saw it as a reality, but I think because I was so – I don’t want to say behind in my development in the sport – but because I peaked at a later time, if you had asked me going into college if I would be a professional athlete for six years after I graduated from undergrad, I would’ve thought you were crazy. That was never on my mind. That was never on my plan. So I think I just had a really unique outlook when it came to swimming because I was able to see things as a new opportunity and something fun and tried to look at it each year instead of every four years.

SW: So to finish up, I’ve read that you met your husband, Michael, at Olympic Trials in 2008; is there a Hollywood type meet cute there?

emily-brunneman-michael-kleuh-golden-goggles-2015

Emily Brunemann Klueh and Michael Klueh at the 2015 Golden Goggles Award; Photo Courtesy: Annie Grevers

EBK: It was a very interesting thing. We were both still in college and he was with the University of Texas and I was at Michigan. That was going into our senior years of college, and so we had no idea. There was no way we were going to move to where each other was. We actually had no idea that anything would continue. We hit it off really well when we were at Olympic Trials and we were talking to each other on the phone and just communicating, and we hung out at the U.S. Open a month later and continued talking every day. At one point, I don’t remember exactly when it was, but we were both like, ‘are we dating? What’s going on here.’ So we decided to give it a try and we were long distance for almost two years, because I did a fifth year at Michigan and he did extra schooling at Texas. Our big thing was, we were having fun. We really enjoyed being around each other, we fell in love and we were taking things one thing at a time. We didn’t have high expectations because we didn’t know what was going to happen. As the two-year long distance was coming to an end and we were starting to make decisions of where we were going to go, we both decided to go to Fullerton and train there, and that was the first time we were in the same city and we ended up living together because of rent and just everything being so expensive in California. But I just feel incredibly fortunate and incredibly lucky to have randomly met somebody who I love so much and care so much about. I think the other thing with both of us is that we’re both really ambitious, and we respect each other’s ambition and so when he was at Texas and I was at Michigan, we knew each other had lives, we knew each other had school and we supported each other – if he couldn’t’ talk, I was fine with it; if I couldn’t talk, he was fine with it, because we both knew that we were doing the things that we needed to do to get to where we wanted to be in our careers and lives, and that’s been a continual process moving forward.

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