Faith Knelson is aptly named insofar as having a racer’s mentality is concerned. But the past year has been about getting an education about everything that takes place when a swimmer doesn’t have that carrot of a cheering crowd or a gleaming medal from competition.

The 16-year-old breaststroke standout took a big step last year, becoming one of the pool prodigies in the Victoria NextGen Swimming program. It was a bumpy ride by times, but at the 2017 Canadian Swimming Trials on Vancouver Island, Knelson delivered in her three breaststrokes, finishing second in the 50 metres (31.25 seconds), third in the 100 (1:08.80) and fifth in the 200 (2:29.71). That performance won her a spot on Canada’s team for this month’s 2017 FINA World Junior Swimming Championships (Aug. 23-30, Indianapolis).

The NextGen program works in association with the Swimming Canada High Performance Centre — Victoria. While she’s from Vancouver Island — “I grew up on water,” Knelson says — it might as well have been another galaxy.

“Training with the centre most of the time and all the international and Olympic team members has really helped me,” says Knelson, who was previously with the Ladysmith-Chemainus club. “I look up to them so much and just being able to train in that high-performance environment has really pushed me outside of my training environment in racing.

“What I’ve noticed is that they’re all very confident in what they do — they show up at the pool like it’s just another day at the office,” adds Knelson. “They know what they’re doing, which is something I aspire to be eventually.”

Making the move involved Knelson’s mother Shelley Anderson relocating full-time to Victoria while her father, Brent Knelson, stays a few nights a week. Faith’s brother, Tyler Knelson, is also planning to attend the University of Victoria, adding another link in the chain of support.

“My mom is basically Wonder Woman to me,” Knelson says. “She bought a house down here, moved her life down here, taught me how to make breakfast before I go to the pool. She does basically everything for me.”

NextGen Head Coach Brad Dingey notes that Knelson is born racer, who gained an excellent facility with breaststroke at Ladysmith-Chemainus with coach Dusan Toth-Szabo.

“Faith is pretty single-minded in terms of her ability to go and race at pretty high levels,” Dingey says. That’s one of things that kind of sets her apart from a lot of her peers. When you get her into a race situation, she’s really confident. The training side of things, that’s where we’re working with her because her level of consistency still isn’t what we would like to see. But her single biggest asset is she loves to race and compete.”

Knelson relates that drive to classic second-born child striving.

“My brother played hockey and baseball so I kind of always followed him around, so I always wanted to win trophies,” she says. “When I was younger I danced quite a bit and you’d get trophies for that but as part of a group. I just always wanted to do things on my own. I played rep softball at a provincial level but the team-sport thing really wasn’t for me, by the time I was 13 I had gradually focused on swimming.

“I also love to run, so I really liked track and field – 400, 800, 1500, so I ran a lot of track for my school,” Knelson adds. “I still did that last year for my school. So I think that’s where my drive for racing came from, it was within running.”

For Knelson, the transition at the start of this swim year meant moving on from a small club with a 25-metre pool to the intense environment of an HPC. Socially, there was also a switch to a much larger high school.

“It was a really difficult transition for a 15-year-old girl (at that time) to make,” Knelson says. “Coming from a small town, to being in a little fish in the big pond, going from a school of 200 kids to one with 1,500 kids was like a blow in the side of the face.”

Along with adapting to greater training standards, Knelson also had to contend with a hip injury and mononucleosis this past winter. She says that while her confidence might have taken a short-term hit, seeing people with NextGen rally to support her drove home the point that she belonged.

“I honestly didn’t feel 100 per cent confident until the Trials,” she says. “But I actually started to feel more at home when I had all of that support. It was still pretty low for most of the year. In March we went off to our taper camp (before Trials) and it was still low. But as soon as we got back, all of a sudden, I felt right at home. I was like, ‘this is my home stage, there is no doubt … I have the advantage, so I really have to go and get after it.’

Regarding the world junior championships, national development coach Ken McKinnon calls Knelson and NextGen teammate Jade Hannah of Halifax, “strong qualifiers out of the Victoria academy.” Swimming Canada High Performance Centre — Ontario athletes Kayla Sanchez and Rebecca Smith, who were each relay specialists at the world championships last month in Budapest, Hungary, are also expected to factor greatly into Canada’s fortunes, along with teammate Penny Oleksiak, who will bolster relays.

Held in odd-numbered years, the world juniors are an important proving ground for a swimmer looking to make the jump to the Olympics, as Oleksiak did in historic fashion from 2015 to 2016.

“For us (as coaches) with the world juniors, we get to see how much the things we’re doing are starting to take hold,” Dingey adds. “At the world juniors, everybody can put a scare into them. When you put them under that kind stress and pressure, that’s when we get a glimpse of how the work we’re doing is taking hold and where the gaps are in terms of where the gaps need to be closed to get to the senior national level.”