Nikola Koltin is the 1st in class student at the "Bosa Milicevic" High School of Economics, where he studied for Economics Technician. He is also a member of the "Spartak" swimming club. Achieving a balance between studying and training, so that neither school nor swimming suffer, is the secret to his success, which he has achieved for the second time in his education.
"I enrolled in the High School of Economics because I am a sportsman and wanted to be able to balance school and sports at the same time. I was also a top student and the best pupil in elementary school, and honestly, I did not expect to be the 1st in class in high school as well. But I started learning and working hard from the first day, continued with my work habits, and succeeded," says Nikola.
Ten years ago, Nikola started swimming for health reasons, and today he says it is an integral part of his life and that he cannot imagine not being able to swim. Although it can be tough, especially when preparing for competitions, with up to ten pool and four gym workouts per week, all the hardships disappear the moment he jumps into the pool and remains alone with the stopwatch.
"Swimming has taught me to persevere through difficult periods because in this sport, there are periods when I do not improve my times for a year or two, but I still have to keep training, and it is not easy to get up at six or seven in the morning and go train. Then I wonder why I'm doing this and whether it makes sense, but somehow I find the strength to endure it, and in the end, every effort is rewarded with good results," Nikola explains.
There are so many good results that it is impossible to list them all. At the age of 14, he was declared the best swimmer in Serbia in his category and held two national records. In the first year of high school, he won third place in the republic competition, while in the third and fourth year he was first, and he stopped counting medals, he says.
"I don't really count medals, because they are not what is most important to me. One day, it will probably be nice to look at them and see everything I've accomplished, but that is not the most important thing to me. In every competition, I race against time and always want to improve and be better than I was," emphasizes Nikola, whose disciplines are mixed and breaststroke at 50, 100, and 200 meters.
His success is evident by the fact that he has been competing for the Serbian national team since last year, and he will participate in the European and World Junior Championships with them this summer. Nikola cannot compare this success to any other.
"Swimming is such a sport where everyone is on their own, but when we go to a competition, we all wear the same jerseys, and when someone swims the whole team is there to support him. That's a big deal, and I can't describe how it feels when I look at the stands and see my teammates from the national team cheering for me," says Nikola.
Nikola Koltin is one of the 12 students of the year awarded by the organization "IT Subotica 2030" as part of the "Students of the Year" project. He is ambitious and will try to enroll in one of the colleges in the United States through swimming, but since that will happen next year due to aligning his results with swimmers of his age, he will use the time he has to take a course in information technology.
"There are a lot of good colleges in America, but I would like one that is strong in both swimming and academics because I don't want to completely give up my sport, and on the other hand, I probably won't be able to earn a living solely from swimming, so I need a strong diploma. I hope that in 2030, I will still be swimming at a high level, that I will have a diploma from a serious college in the United States, and that I will working in a job that I love. Since I want to study something related to computers and IT, I hope I can work for a foreign company from anywhere in the world, or I can work for a foreign company here in Subotica and still train swimming," Nikola says.
