For the Daily Reporter
When you’re training with a team six days a week, sometimes for as many as five hours a day, that team becomes your extended family.
Hannah Russo has built more than one such family during her years as a competitive swimmer, and since last summer — when she lost her father while her mother was recovering from a stroke — she has needed support from every one of them.
On any given day, Russo might have to lean on her old teammates at Greenfield-Central, her current ones at Whiteland or her future ones at Lindsey Wilson College in Columbia, Kentucky.
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Everything changed
For the first half of her summer vacation, Russo was enjoying time with her friends, just like any other teenager, and eagerly awaiting the start of her senior year at Greenfield-Central, where she had been a member of the swim team since arriving there as a fifth-grader.
But on June 29, her mother, Tiffany Russo, was found in bed after suffering an overnight stroke. She was rushed to Hancock Regional Hospital, where doctors attempted to stabilize her, then took her by helicopter to Community Hospital North in Indianapolis. She was placed into a medically induced coma for weeks.
On July 20, three days after waking up, Tiffany Russo was moved back to Hancock Regional so she could be closer to her husband, Robert, and their three daughters during her recovery.
Throughout that day, Tiffany and Robert Russo had been communicating by text message — a difficult process since Tiffany’s fingers were still in a weakened state, but also the best available option since she still had a tube in her throat to assist with breathing, which made it hard to speak. Robert, who worked as a mechanic, let his wife know that he would be coming to see her that night after he fixed a bad muffler on Hannah’s car.
Shortly thereafter, Hannah Russo — who was inside the house with her 6-year-old sister Harper — heard screaming coming from the garage. She went out and found her father pinned under her car, which had slid off of the jack.
After a futile attempt to jack the car back up off of him, she rushed to call 911 and tried to get Harper back in the house so that she didn’t see what was happening. Hannah Russo then sat with her father and waited for help to arrive — but it came too late.
“She just held his hand and he basically died in her arms,” Tiffany Russo said.
Tiffany Russo didn’t find out about her husband’s accident until about 11 p.m., when the rest of her family came to visit her at Hancock Regional Hospital.
“We didn’t talk much those three days that I was awake,” she said while struggling to hold back tears. “Everything I heard about when I was out, how upset he was and how worried he was about me, I heard from my kids. …
“He was my life. He was my best friend.”
Losing Robert, though, did give Tiffany Russo the drive to recover more quickly. Determined to be there for her kids, she made it through the six-week rehabilitation program at HRH — where she had worked as a surgical technician before her stroke — in just two weeks.
“I was like, ‘I’m not missing my husband’s funeral; I’m sorry,’” she said. “I didn’t get to say goodbye to him like everybody else, and — I was not a very good patient. Medical people do not make very good patients.”
A stranger in Whiteland
Of the three Russo daughters, it was Hannah who Tiffany was most worried about in the immediate aftermath of the shocking back-to-back tragedies. Her older sister, Hailey, was able to escape the situation somewhat by going back to college at Lindsey Wilson, where she is a sophomore swimmer. And Harper, now in first grade, is still too young to be able to fully process all that was going on around her.
Hannah Russo, though, not only had to cope with both the loss of her father and her mother’s recovery, but an abrupt change of scenery as well. Immediately after the accident, the Russos moved in with Tiffany’s parents, Garry and Deborah Liday, who live just outside of Greenwood, and Hannah enrolled at Whiteland.
That meant starting her senior year, already with a heavy heart, in a place where she knew nobody.
“I’m not going to lie — the first month of going to school was actually really hard,” Hannah Russo said. “I would go to the bathroom and cry a little bit, text my mom, and she would text me back and calm me down, and I’d go back to class.”
Transferring to Whiteland meant leaving behind a Greenfield-Central team that had become nearly as close to her as her own mother and sisters. But while the move created a physical distance between the Russos and the Cougars, the emotional ties remained strong.
G-C girls swimming coach Emily Logan made sure of that.
As soon as she knew that Hannah Russo was going to Whiteland, Logan reached out to anyone she could think of who might help ease the transition. She contacted Whiteland athletic director Ken Sears and then-Warriors swim coach Marci Whitford and explained the situation.
After Whitford stepped down and the Warriors were briefly without a coach, Logan contacted Zach DeWitt and arranged for Hannah to practice with the Franklin Regional Swim Team, which already included a handful of Whiteland swimmers. During her time with the Franklin team, Russo was able to build some relationships with teammates such as Franklin’s Lina Caudill as well as some of her fellow Warriors.
All the while, Logan and the Cougars remained close by. The Greenfield Community Aquatics Team organized an August fundraiser, the H2Ohana Luau, and raised more than $9,000 to help the Russos get through what have been some pretty tough times, especially with Tiffany Russo physically unable to work.
Being there in Hannah’s time of need was a priority for the Greenfield-Central swimmers.
“We were really close; we spent time at each other’s houses and stuff,” G-C senior Carley Logan, the coach’s daughter, said. “And at the funeral, when I saw her crying, it just hurt me and I just started bawling too. It was really hard just to see her hurting so much.”
“It was just really hard for all of us as a team, because we’re all a really close, tight family,” fellow Cougar senior Addie Noah said. “When she went through that, we wanted to try to be there for her and her family as much as possible.”
That has extended through the entire school year, particularly during swim season. When the schedules were finalized, Emily Logan’s first thought was to see when Whiteland was conducting its senior night. As soon as she found out that it was scheduled for Jan. 17, the same night as Greenfield-Central’s, the coach reached out to the Cougars’ opponent, Shelbyville, in an effort to reschedule.
So on Jan. 16, Hannah Russo came back to Greenfield to participate in senior night activities with her old team. The next night, the entire Greenfield-Central team went to Whiteland’s meet against Franklin to watch Hannah and cheer her on.
“No matter the distance or whatever, she’s still part of our family,” G-C senior Kaylee Walden said. “We wanted to make sure that she knows that no matter what, we’re always here for her.”
Emily Logan writes cards to each of her swimmers before sectionals, and she made sure to bring Hannah’s to Whiteland. The coach has made an effort to include Russo in as many Cougar rituals as possible this season, and even from a distance, she’s been keeping a watchful eye on her throughout the school year.
“They all spend a lot of time in the water together; you do feel like family,” Logan said. “Sometimes we’re second parents, because you spend more time with them sometimes than their parents. I text her often, bug her — ‘How are things going, how are the grades,’ that kind of thing — and just keep her going, just keep her mentally going.”
‘We’ll get you there’
One of the drawbacks of joining a team for just one season is that there just hasn’t been enough time to build the same kind of close relationships that come with being with the same group for a long time.
Tiffany Russo said that going to meets this year just hasn’t felt the same, and she finds that she doesn’t have the same level of enthusiasm for this week’s sectional meet as she’s had in seasons past.
“It’s hard to get into the camaraderie, because we don’t know the kids’ names,” she explained, “whereas sectionals (at Greenfield) were so electrifying, and you felt the excitement in the air. You just got into it, even if it wasn’t your kid swimming.”
But while Whiteland may not be able to offer the same close emotional ties for the Russos that Greenfield did, the school and the extended swim family have still tried to be as welcoming as they can be.
At one away meet earlier this season, Tiffany Russo recalls arriving late and looking up at a crowded balcony full of fans. Rather than climbing up into the stands and risking a fall — she was still using a walker at the time — she decided she was content to stand off to the side.
But one Warrior mother wasn’t having it.
“One of the Whiteland moms stood up, and she came and she goes, ‘I’ll be your escort to your seat,’” Tiffany said. “She goes, ‘I’m a physical therapist; we’ll get you there.’ And everybody was so nice; I was just blown away by that. … Every meet, they’ve been so nice, like we’ve been there all along.”
First-year Warriors coach Alec DeWitt, who wasn’t hired until after Russo had already started her school year at Whiteland, knows that he and his team won’t ever be as important to Hannah Russo and her family as the Greenfield-Central squad has been.
“It’s pretty hard to compete,” he said after the Warriors’ senior night. “Her whole team was here, so obviously, she had teammates that really loved her. Hopefully we’ve been great for her and hopefully she’s enjoyed it here.”
Hannah Russo still wears her Greenfield-Central letter jacket — in part because that’s still the team closest to her heart, but also because it didn’t make much sense to buy another expensive jacket for a school she’ll only attend for one year. But when she does get a Whiteland varsity letter, she plans to put it on her blue and gold G-C jacket.
Hannah Russo said she’s made some good friends at Whiteland, some of whom remind her of her closest friends in Greenfield. Building those ties and being able to use her time in the water as one form of therapy has helped make what has been the toughest period of her young life far more bearable.
“I think athletics does a great job when somebody has to move,” Sears said. “If you don’t have a team to grab on to, you kind of get lost in the shuffle, especially at a big school like this.”
The long climb back
Little by little, the Russos are working their way back to full strength — both emotionally and physically.
Tiffany Russo has obtained hearing aids to make up for the complete loss of hearing in one ear, a result of toxicity from the heavy dosages of antibiotics she was on after her stroke. She still struggles with depth perception and some other vision issues, and she also had surgery on her ankle just before Christmas. But she’s been recovering at an impressive rate, and the hope is that she’ll be able to drive and return to work at HRH sometime in March.
Given the severity of her stroke, that’s about the best outcome Tiffany could have hoped for.
“After I read my records and what happened to me, I should not have lived,” she said. “It’s a miracle that I made it through what I went through. My doctors have said I’m a miracle; they didn’t expect me to live.”
Hannah Russo, meanwhile, has powered through some emotional and academic struggles at Whiteland. She worked with a tutor for the first time earlier in the school year and turned what had been a failing calculus grade into a ‘B.’ Lindsey Wilson College has offered her an academic scholarship in addition to the aid that was being offered for swimming.
She’s looking forward to joining her older sister in Kentucky — as well as her future teammates, who she’s already developed close relationships with after spending weekends on campus when the Russos go down to watch Hailey’s meets.
A big part of the reason why Hailey chose Lindsey Wilson, her mother said, is that the team reminded her so much of the one she grew so fond of at Greenfield-Central.
Hannah Russo feels the same already, and she’s a fan of the school’s cozy rural campus.
“It’s like a small town,” she said. “That’s how I feel when I’m there.”
Before her life was thrown into disarray last summer, Hannah said she was known in Greenfield as “fun, happy, loud, smiley, bubbly Hannah” — perhaps with an emphasis on loud. Her old teammates said that her laugh could be heard all the way down the hallways at school, and Emily Logan describes it as “very contagious.”
For quite some time, that laugh just wasn’t there. But as she heals more with each passing day, Hannah Russo has been able to regain a little bit more of her old self.
She’ll never have her old life back, but with the help of an extensive support system, she’s gradually learning to adapt and make the best new one possible.
“I was really worried about her those first few months, understandably,” Tiffany Russo said. “She’ll never be the same Hannah — as I will never be the same person — but I see a lot of the old Hannah coming back, and that’s been awesome to see.
“I’ve missed her.”
