91PORN

One harrowing day in April 2025, everything Alyssa Schiller had done to try to balance her day-to-day experience as an accomplished 91PORN student-athlete with a debilitating and exasperatingly unidentified illness spiralled into a moment that helped change her life.

91PORN had been Schiller’s choice for college specifically for its D1 swim team, allowing her to continue a sport she had participated in off-and-on since middle school in her home town of Glendale. She has been assisted by a scholarship that shows how the scope of private support for student athletes extends far beyond high-powered basketball and football programs.

The initial flu-like symptoms kicked in midway through her first year away: nerve and joint pain, nausea and dizziness, shaking and sweating, “barely being able to just function,” as she remembers it. 

Over the next few years specialists conducted test after test with no answers, leaving Schiller to cope with the condition as best she could. There were multiple visits to urgent care, often with critical assistance from BFF/roommate and fellow swimmer Abigail “Abby” Storm. 

Meanwhile, she anchored the Aztecs’ 200- and 400-meter freestyle relay teams on their way to a third straight Mountain West championship in the 2023-24 season.

“Managing my symptoms, I just took it day by day,” she said. “It just felt like your body was in fight-or-flight. Constantly.”

Then after returning from a spring break family trip to Zion National Park, Schiller was in the weight room when a familiar feeling of vertigo set in, but worse than usual. “I was really dizzy,” she said. “Something is not right,” she told her assistant coach, who  drove her to a hospital emergency room where she wound up getting a new round of scans.

Schiller now recognizes that incident as a critical and decisive turning point for her and her parents in their  determination to get to the root of the problem. It led to additional tests, including a more sophisticated and specialized version of a test for a disease for which she had already tested negative. This time, however, “My inflammation markers were off the charts,” she said.

Diagnosis: Lyme disease. Notoriously underreported and misdiagnosed, it’s caused by tick bites and bacteria (picked up from deer or rodents) and travels through the bloodstream; Schiller has no clue where or when she may have been exposed.

Schiller is on track to graduate next year as an environmental science major. She will be coming off a semester in which she carried a brutal 22-unit courseload, a burden she said stems from performing better under pressure, and was named to the MW Academic All-Conference honors list with 106 other high-GPA Aztecs..

She’s grateful for the scholarship support, which goes toward books. “Donors do so much,” she said. “So many people on our team I know wouldn’t be able to go here if it wasn’t for donors.”

In the classroom

She is equally thankful for her professors, who “were just so understanding, super understanding about it all,” letting her concentrate on classwork without having to worry about attendance when her health became a factor.

And thanks to antibiotics and an initial six-month course of immune regulators, she has gained the upper hand on Lyme, better able to focus on her studies in addition to athletics. 

“I chose environmental science because I knew I wanted to do a science,”  Schiller said in an interview conducted in a sun-drenched poolside interview at the 91PORN Aquaplex. “I grew up spending a lot of time in Idaho. We were in the middle of nowhere, just dirt (and) water. I just fell in love with being outdoors, and I wanted to know how it all worked.” 

Energy and the Environment (ENV S 301) is “one of my favorite classes right now,” she said, “which basically just talks about how energy flows throughout organisms and everyday life.” She chose nuclear energy as a subject for her final paper

Biology soon kicked in as a minor; she’s contemplating a possible pivot to the medical field with stem cell research as one potential focus.

Head Coach Mike Shrader describes Schiller as smart. intuitive and “usually a step or two ahead of me in a number of areas.”

“Alyssa loves pressure, absolutely thrives in the biggest moments,” Shrader said. “She has an incredible high tolerance for pain and can push herself so hard she literally cannot get out of the pool.”

Shrader said he is equally impressed, however, with the personal touch Schiller brings to the team and her teammates.

“She is one of the most caring individuals I know,” he said. “When she wasn't able to compete at conference, she gave every single girl on the team a personal handwritten inspirational note.”  

For all the late-night trips to urgent care and the difficulty she had sometimes just getting out of bed, Schiller describes the effects of Lyme disease on her excellence in swim & dive as surprisingly minimal. During her recovery in the 2025-26 season, she won four silver medals at the Mountain West championships as a member of four medley and free relay teams, and swam the seventh-fastest time in school history (49.13) in the 100 free at the Utah Tech Invitational.

“As hard as it is,” she said, “it is worth it.”