This is the third of seven profiles of the candidates running for Nashville mayor. For more on the mayor’s race, click here.
At 36, Jeremy Kane is the youngest of the candidates running for Nashville mayor, but his bio already reads like a highlight reel.
He swam in the Olympic trials, worked as a speechwriter for John Kerry and founded a widely praised charter school. He counts President Bill Clinton as a mentor and even dated Chelsea Clinton in college. (At the time, the New York Post described him as “hunky.”)
If there’s one reason Kane has an all-star resume, it may be his intensity — a quality that was fostered long before he decided he wanted to be mayor.
Kane walks up to the record wall inside the Centennial Sportsplex pool.
“You can see me,” he says, pointing to a plaque for the national junior team.
At the other end of the room, swimmers are setting up pool lanes for practice. The place reeks of chlorine.
“You can never get it away,” Kane jokes. “It just smells kind of like home.”
Through most of middle and high school, he swam four or five hours every day here. The hardcore training didn’t let up even after his father lost his job as a minister.
“I just remember seeing my parents crying at the dinner table,” he says. “To watch your father come home after working 12 hours a day, get in a car to go out to the airport and rent cars — and knowing at 13 or 14 that he’s doing that for you? That stays with you your entire life.”
Olympic Dreams
Kane’s mom also picked up several part-time jobs to help pay for his swimming career. He says he never missed a swim trip. He never lacked for a racing swimsuit or goggles.
And the family’s hard work paid off. At 17, Kane competed in the Olympic trials in the 1,500-meter freestyle — the longest event, about a 15 minute race. He came in two seconds away from qualifying for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.
“I wish I could go back, because I didn’t feel the pressure then,” he says. “I just thought, ‘My Olympic trials is four years from now. When I’m 21, I’m more developed, have more training.’ “
He resolved to make the next Olympic team. He started swimming at Stanford and trained six days a week, twice a day. Swimming took over his life — but his body could not keep up.
“My resting heart rate went from 37, when I was training for the Olympics, to 155,” he says.
He started having fainting spells. Once, he says, he passed out during a swim meet, in the water.
“I literally just got to the point where I could not get out of bed, sleeping 14 hours a day, and woke up and never felt rested,” he says.
His competitive swimming career was over. That was a hard lesson to learn.
“I can work really, really hard, obviously, and overexert myself,” he says. “It is taking time for myself, just to step back. It doesn’t have to be intense.”
‘The Ultimate Commitment’
But that didn’t mean Kane became a less intense guy overall. After a few years living in D.C., where he worked for President Clinton and Sen. Kerry, he moved back to Nashville and got involved in the charter school movement. At 27, he decided to start his own charter school. He told his wife Tracy he wanted to quit his job and take out a second mortgage on their house.
His banker told him it was a foolish idea and tried to discourage him, he says. But he saw it as the only way he could convince people to invest in him, even though he wasn’t an educator and had no experience running a charter school.
“If I can show that I’m committed — and made the ultimate commitment of leaving my job and mortgaging our house — then that would say, ‘OK, if he’s committed, then I can be committed as well,’ ” he says.
“No one’s going to believe in you and invest in you unless you are invested in yourself.”
Kane tells the story of how he mortgaged his house to start LEAD Academy at almost every campaign event, and it has a happy ending: LEAD has expanded to several schools and has so far graduated all of its seniors. (The Kanes have also paid off their second mortgage.)
It’s a vision of Kane that he hopes voters will buy into as they choose their next mayor — someone who goes all in, but who’s learned how to make the hard work pay off.
On Air - 90.3 WPLN-FM