Nice story on the Blackman sisters in the DMN

[LA_Mustang]

Highland Park swim twins sticking together

Blackman sisters tough to separate, but don't call them a package

03:14 AM CST on Friday, February 20, 2004

By PAUL J. WEBER / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

Pajama-clad while soaking in Law & Order two years ago, Candace Blackman rolled off the couch to once again answer the phone.

It was the first day colleges could call Candace and her identical twin, Jennifer, and the ringing was incessant. Sometimes, a school on the West Coast beeped in and put a coach back East on hold. This call, however, hardly lasted long enough to interrupt Candace's show.

"So tell me," the head coach of the highly ranked Division I swim program posed, "are you and Jen a package deal, or what?"

Click.

Souring the Blackmans is a tall order. The Highland Park seniors, multiple state champions and record holders, are just as likely to hug you at a meet as they are to beat you by three seconds, the swimming equivalent of three touchdowns.

But if there's a way to rankle the sisters, who will take their last high school strokes at the UIL state swimming and diving championships starting today in Austin, it's to cheapen their individuality. Crack the hackneyed quips about twins. Don't bother to get to know them apart.

"I don't like being called a package, and I don't like being called a deal," Candace said.

"Some people," Jennifer added, "think it's like we can't function on our own. If we had to be apart, we could."

But the sisters – who cut out the face of four-time Olympic champion Janet Evans on a poster and inserted their own when they were 11 – aren't ready to separate just yet.

The Blackmans signed with SMU last November, choosing to spend the next four years on a campus five blocks from their home in University Park.

It wasn't supposed to turn out that way. They weren't supposed to stay together, and they certainly weren't supposed to go to a college in the same MAPSCO grid as home.

Those were the only two rules that Chris and Marie Blackman, the twins' parents, set when the recruiting trips began last year. When Chris left the girls at the airport for their first college visit, Kenny Chesney's sappy country ballad There Goes My Life crept through his car stereo.

Chris pulled off the road and cried for five minutes.

No doubt it was hard, but recruiting twins might have been even tougher on the colleges.

"We tried to look at Candace, then look at Jennifer, and not the two together," SMU women's swim coach Steve Collins said. "That was important because there was no guarantee that either one, or both, would come here."

There was an unspoken delicacy that college coaches had to approach with Candace and Jennifer. If the sisters took official visits to the same schools, they went on separate weekends. If a coach called and began by speaking with Jennifer, Candace (or vice versa) preferred for the coach to hang up and call right back instead of just passing the phone along.

It wasn't until the family moved from Longview to Arlington when the girls were 7 that they began swimming. But Candace and Jennifer quickly began winning higher levels of competition.

Both own UIL Class 4A state records (Jennifer in the 100-yard freestyle; Candace in the 50 free, 200 free and 100 butterfly). But Candace has competitively climbed above her sister in recent years. Candace, who has an all-class state record in the 100 butterfly, already has her qualifying cut for the Olympic trials in July, where placing in the top six of the 100 or 200 freestyle will put her on the Olympic team.

Jennifer, meanwhile, will vie for her qualifying cut Thursday at the sectional championships in College Station, Texas.


E-mail pweber@dallasnews.com