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The Girls Swim & Dive team has fewer members this season than the boys’ team, but they are still making a splash. Each meet, swimmers and divers continue to set personal records and improve over the season. The team will compete in the sectional preliminaries on Thursday, Feb. 6, at Highland Hills Middle School. Sophomore Cassandra Fetz is on the three-member dive team, and sophomore Sydney Lamaster is on the swim team. Read more for the Sports Spotlight Q&A.

Sydney is in her second year of focusing on competitive swimming. When she was younger, she joined her siblings on their swim team but didn’t take the sport seriously until joining the Providence team.

She is in the House of Spirit, spring musical, children’s show, Book Club, Drawing Club, and Providence Singers. She also takes part in an art class with Louisville Visual Art.

Her events are the 50-yard backstroke in the 200-yard medley relay, 50 or 100-yard freestyle, 200-yard freestyle relay (first leg), and 400 freestyle relay (second leg). Sometimes she will swim the 200 freestyle or 50-yard breaststroke if needed.

Question: What do you like about being on the Swim & Dive Team?
Answer: What I like about being on the Swim & Dive Team is Coach Jim Pfeiffer’s coaching and the people on the team. Coach Jim is really casual with most practices and is really nice about telling us what we do wrong and right. It’s super easy to join even if you aren’t regularly involved in sports and can easily get you a varsity letter.

Q: What is your favorite event?
A: My favorite event is the 50 free because I’m best at freestyle, and I like trying to beat my old time. Doing a sprint is less stressful for me since it goes faster.

Q: What has been a highlight of the season for you?
A: A highlight of the season for me was when I beat my time at a meet and got first in my heat, which made me happy, since that doesn’t happen that often.

Q: What is your favorite subject?
A: My favorite subject is art because I get to be creative and improve my talents.

Cassandra is in her first year diving and also plays Softball and Girls Golf. She is in the House of Loyalty.

Question: What do you like about being on the Swim & Dive Team?
Answer: I like the Dive Team because not all practices are serious but also fun. We sometimes play water polo.

Q: What is your favorite dive?
A: My favorite dive is probably my reverse because it is my cleanest dive.

Q: What has been a highlight of the season for you?
A: A highlight of my season is probably getting second place in a big meet.

Q: What do you like about being a Pioneer?
A: You meet so many nice people and great friends and teachers. Being a Pioneer is the best!

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Have job, will travel. Several of our alumni are taking this adage to heart by taking part in the growing need for travel nurses and health professionals, filling in gaps in staffing at hospitals around the country. From the outside, it looks like a chance to be paid to travel and to work on short-term assignments. And while the travel certainly is an allure, there are professional benefits as well, said Hannah Fontan ’12, a registered nurse specializing in post-anesthetic care; Ashley (Ricks) Hebner ’11, a registered nurse with a certification in pediatric emergency care; and Jacob Golembeski ’10, an occupational therapist.

Hebner has been a travel nurse for about two years and is fulfilling a goal she has had since becoming a nurse, having earned her bachelor’s in nursing in 2016 from Galen College. She worked for two years at a hospital in Louisville to gain experience and set out on her travel career. Since she receives a stipend to cover her living expenses, she is able to pay off debt – and travel with her husband, Gavan, whom she married in June 2019.

She has worked in Connecticut, Alabama, and Missouri and especially liked working on the East Coast and at Yale Children’s Hospital. As a travel nurse, she enjoys not having the responsibility that she did in a permanent assignment – attending staff meetings and dealing with management, for example – as well as being somewhat empowered in her work. If she were to encounter unsafe practices or unprofessional conduct while on assignment, for example, she has the freedom to report it to her assigning company and cancel the contract if necessary.

“You can’t cancel every contract or you’re going to have a hard time finding work, but to say, ‘This is unsafe; please fix it, or I’m leaving’ is pretty nice,” Hebner said.

Being a travel nurse does have its challenges. Openings in her specialty are sometimes limited, and the pay isn’t the same everywhere. Some locations may seem desirable because she’d love to visit there, but their desirability as vacations destinations actually lowers the pay rate.

“Most of the places that sound really great to get to work in don’t pay as well because they’re considered vacation spots,” Hebner said. “If you’re not doing it to make the extra money, then by all means, go for those vacation spots. But the majority of people do it for the love of traveling and the extra cash.”

Another challenge is being so far away from her husband during the work week, but when he visits, they can enjoy sightseeing and seeing a place they might not have been able to afford otherwise.

“He has thoroughly enjoyed getting to visit the different cities I’m in and make fun memories with me,” Hebner said. “I plan to stay as a travel nurse for as long as it works for myself and my husband. We love to travel, and this is such an awesome way to get to go places we might not have or afford things we maybe would’ve had to save a long time for. I love getting to be a pediatric nurse all over the country!”

Travel nursing leads to professional growth

Hannah Fontan ’12 in Joshua Tree, Calif. She says: “My best friend, Clarissa, wanted to have a photo shoot with her mustangs, and we had the best time. I’m so thankful that travel nursing has brought me the best lifelong friends and pictures like this that I get to treasure forever. “

Fontan also likes the opportunity to travel and visit different places with her fiancé, Evan Hutt ’12. But it wasn’t just the travel that attracted her to the job. She actually was afraid of taking on a travel nurse job because of the need to change jobs every few months.

“I’m a very introverted person, and the thought of having a new job every three months terrified me,” Fontan said. “As I grew as a nurse and got more comfortable with my skills, I decided I needed to push myself to meet new people, see new places, and get myself out of my comfort zone. I am so happy I made that decision for myself because I have grown so much as a person and nurse.”

Fontan earned her bachelor’s in nursing at Spalding University in 2016 and worked for a couple years at a local hospital before deciding to become a travel nurse. As a travel nurse, she finds that it forces her to do her best because she only has “a limited to show the coworkers and doctors I work around what I’m worth as a nurse,” she said. It also allows her “to learn different patient populations, policies, and procedures” at each hospital. She still works in the PACU assisting patients as they recover from the effects of anesthesia post-surgery, but each hospital is a little different.

As far as the travel, she’s worked in Seattle, Wash., Palm Springs and San Francisco, Calif., Bangor, Maine, and Knoxville, Tenn. She has loved visiting places in each location with her fiancé. Their favorite spot was San Juan Island, Wash., where they rented mopeds, took in the scenery, saw dolphins, and took a whale watching tour and spotted a pod of orcas.

“It was one of the best weekend trips we have taken while traveling,” Fontan said.

With her wedding coming up in July, Fontan said she plans to keep taking travel assignments for about six months. She and Hutt planned from the beginning to pick their favorite locale and settle down there when they married, and that’s still the plan.

“I am so thankful I made myself jump into this career,” Fontan said. “We have had the adventure of a lifetime, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for us.”

Due diligence needed

Golembeski is an occupational therapist who has been taking travel assignments since July 2018 after earning his master’s in occupational therapy from the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences in Austin, Texas, in December 2017. Like Hebner and Fontan, he enjoys the opportunity to travel as well as the professional growth he has experienced.

While Hebner and Fontan work in the same type of unit in each hospital where they’re assigned, his assignments are in various types of settings and specialties. He would prefer to work in inpatient neurological or outpatient hand care, but waiting for openings in those specialties limits his assignments. So he finds himself choosing to work in acute care, outpatient, home health, or skilled nursing settings and has learned from each type while affirming his original preference.

“It’s allowed me the realize that’s what I want to do, without a doubt,” Golembeski said. “It helps me become a more rounded therapist because now I’m seeing the clinical reason for each and every setting.”

Being a traveling OT has limitations, however. Nurses and physical therapists can take advantage of a licensure compact between states, meaning as long as they are applying to work in states that are members with their original licensing state, a new license is not required if they pay for that type of licensing. As an OT, he must apply for a license to work in each state, and the application process varies by state. California has one of the longest application approval periods, while others are much faster. He recently missed out on an assignment in Louisiana because he is still waiting for his license to be approved in that state. After waiting several weeks, he’s now applying to an assignment on the Texas-Louisiana border because he is licensed in Texas.

His goal with this assignment is to be near his fiancée, Ashlyn, who is a physical therapist working in Louisiana as she finalizes plans for their April wedding. If he gets this assignment, he’ll be a few hours away. Once they are married, they will look for travel assignments that need an OT and PT in the same location, at least through the end of the year. Then they will probably settle down in Tennessee, partway between their two families. Being close to family is important to them, he said, even though their travels have tempted them to settle elsewhere.

Golembeski’s first travel assignment was in Redding, Calif., when the area was undergoing large, uncontrolled fires. His fiancée and four other classmates from St. Augustine were assigned to the same area, and that helped him get acclimated to the travel healthcare life.

“We might have been in the middle of the mountains in the middle of nowhere in beautiful California, but we had a tight-knit group that we were really close to,” he said.

His assignments have been in remote areas and busy urban areas, from Berkley, Calif, to Colorado Springs, Colo. Most assignments are 13 weeks, although the first assignment was extended to 32. Picking up and moving to a new location – and waiting for licensing – can be stressful, but the ability to travel and to earn a tax-free stipend for living expenses makes up for it, he said. He can focus on paying off his college loans and paying for the wedding while living in a new region every few months. For example, his fiancé earned twice as much in a week in a travel assignment as in her current permanent assignment, he said. For him, the higher pay rate helped tied him over as he waited for the approval on his Louisiana license.

But he stresses that working in travel healthcare can have its pitfalls. It’s important for those considering such a career to fully investigate the field to ensure a positive experience. There are Facebook groups that share information and insights, such as tips on how to find living accommodations at a cost below the stipend. With such temporary assignments, travel healthcare providers tend to look for fully furnished units, which can be limited in some areas. Golembeski scours Airbnb, Craigslist, and Apartment Finder for the best deal.

“It’s kind of a gamble (looking for housing), but it works out,” noting one stay was in a mother-in-law suite where the landlord provided fresh fruits and vegetables. Another was in the basement of a mansion owned by an elderly couple in Broadmoor Estates in Colorado.

It’s also important to realize that the companies that manage the assignments are businesses looking to make a profit, he said. One tip he shares is being sure to negotiate a more flexible cancellation date in order to cancel a contract if necessary without penalty.

“It is a business for the recruiters, so negotiating is extremely important,” Golembeski said. “It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, but if you ask the right questions and you do your due diligence, it can be very profitable and beneficial.”

Being open to different options and being flexible also are important, he said. It’s also key to have a good support system. For him, it’s his family — and the reason he wants to settle down near his parents and brother and his children who live in Southern Indiana. It also helps having been prepared for such opportunities as he was by attending Providence.

“Providence really did help prepare me for everything,” he said. “The teachers were there. There’s always a great support system. They set you up with the skills needed to navigate life. They really do.”

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