Doug McConnell ’79 loves swimming. Actually, that is an understatement.
“I swam my whole life,” he said. “I started when I was a little boy. My high school didn’t have a pool, so I swam at the YMCA. I was a walk-on for the Illinois swim team. I ended up becoming captain of the team during my senior year and was gratified that I did well with that.”
Doug graduated college, started a career, started a family, and still enjoyed time in the water. Eventually, he moved from swimming in pools to open water.
“I was introduced to open water swimming by a cousin-in-law who was a triathlete, and I started swimming with him,” Doug said. “Open water swimming is a whole different ballgame from pool swimming. You have to deal with currents, water temperature, things bite you. It’s totally different.
“In 1994, my father David announced to us that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. Other than the baseball player, I didn’t know anything about it,” he said. “My dad was a veterinarian, so he was very clinical about it. He told us, ‘In three to five years, my muscles will give out, and I will starve to death.’”
Doug and his sisters wrestled with what this meant for their father and their family.
“This was a lightning bolt,” Doug explained. “It was rare, something that was isolated. It wasn’t hereditary, so it wasn’t something my sisters and I needed to worry about having, but it was something our dad would just have to deal with.
“He survived 12 years post-diagnosis, which was a mixed blessing. My kids got to know him and that was wonderful, but they will always remember him in a wheelchair, which is heartbreaking to me.
“My dad passed away in 2006. A few months later, my sister Ellen was diagnosed with ALS. Now, even though this was not something that was supposed to touch our family again, here was this second diagnosis,” Doug explained. “A second lightning bolt. Was there something in our family that caused that?”
Doug and Ellen decided that they needed to know more and do more for people with ALS. “One of the top ALS research centers in the world is in Chicago at Northwestern University. We met the researchers and were fascinated with what they were doing there, but we were blown away by one of the researchers, Dr. Hande Ozdinler,” he said.
“She works at Northwestern in the Feinberg School of Medicine as an assistant professor of research. I told her that I didn’t know if we were going to end up raising any money or anything, but, if we did, we were pushing all of the chips across the table to her.”
The McConnells’ interest in Dr. Ozdinler’s research has started showing dividends. “One compound we provided money to in the early time of supporting the research is now going through the FDA approval process as a drug that could be a treatment. For people with a degenerative disease, this has huge potential.”
Doug and Ellen were invigorated by what they were seeing at Northwestern. “We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to build a bridge from ALS, where people lose their muscles, and swimming, where you have to use your muscles all the time and have to breathe deeply?’” Doug said. “Ellen came up with the name ‘A Long Swim’ to line up with ALS.”
The siblings founded A Long Swim in 2011, and Doug rattled off an impressive and astounding list of swims he completed for the organization: Tampa Bay, the English Channel (“It’s 22 miles but swims like 30,” he quipped.), the Catalina Channel, the loop around Manhattan island, from Molokai to Oahu in Hawaii, Evanston to Chicago, and Nantucket to Martha’s Vineyard, among others.
“When I finished swimming the English Channel, it was the middle of the night when I arrived in France, but I knew I had to call Ellen. I called her and she celebrated with me.” Like their father, Ellen outlived the initial life expectancy she was given at the time of her diagnosis. She passed away in 2018, 12 years after doctors told her that she only had three to five years left.
The mission of A Long Swim resonated with people, and the organization has raised over $3 million for ALS research. “One of the things we thought of to raise more money for the charity,” Doug explained, “was to host for other people and they were popular. Most of the swimmers in those events are triathletes who are trying to improve their time on the swimming portion.”
The cofounders continued to dream about the future of the organization and looked for ways to scale up the events and the organization’s profile.
“Thirteen years ago, Ellen and I heard about a swim they were doing in the canals in Amsterdam as a fundraiser for an ALS charity in Europe,” Doug said. “We got in touch with the organizers and they sent us a lot of videos and we thought, ‘Boy, this looks like the Chicago river!’ and wondered, ‘Can we do this?’”
Doug and Ellen set to work to make a Chicago River swim happen. “The organizers in Amsterdam were so helpful and sent us safety plans and so much information,” he said. “We thought, ‘How difficult could it be to get this approved?’ Well, it took thirteen years, but we finally got there.”
As they explored planning a Chicago River swim, Doug and Ellen learned about the history of their city and the river that shares its name.
“Along the way, we found out there were competitive swims in the river 100 years ago,” Doug said. “In the 1800s, the Chicago River was a sewer and fed into Lake Michigan. It was so bad. It was poisoning the drinking water of the city. They reversed the flow of the river in 1900, so Lake Michigan is the source, and the river flows eventually into the Mississippi. In 1908, the river was clean, and everyone was excited about it, and they held competitive swims to celebrate. They held those until 1927. I grew up swimming around Chicago and knew nothing about any of this.
“Over time, the water quality decreased, so the swims had to stop, and the river became an industrial waterway. All these factories dumped into the river. The world’s biggest stockyard was in Chicago, and they dumped all the animal waste, byproducts, body parts, even hides, into that part of the river, which is still called Bubbly Creek today. In the 1970s, the EPA came in and worked to improve the river, and the river cleaned itself.
“Over 50 years, the turnaround in the river is miraculous. You talk to old-timers, and you mention swimming in the Chicago River, and their heads practically explode,” he laughed. “They cannot imagine why someone would do something like that.”
A Long Swim had their work cut out for them when it came to public opinion. “We needed to reassure people that the water is clean,” Doug said. “In the last year, we glommed onto the water testing procedures they use for the beaches on Lake Michigan. That was something people knew about and was consistent with EPA guidelines. The University of Illinois Chicago campus tests the water every day and then puts up flags to indicate the level of cleanliness: red, yellow, green. We jumped on that.
“From the second of September to the twentieth, we had nine locations with daily water testing along the course, and all of them were in the green flag range. It was gratifying to show those results to our swimmers and the city leaders to reassure everyone.”
After years of dreaming and working diligently to make it happen, A Long Swim’s Chicago River event happened on September 21, 2025. “We had 300 swimmers gather, and they were thrilled to be there,” Doug said. “Half did a one-mile swim and half did two loops of the course. It was a well-produced event, if I do say so myself. We hired the guys who did the Chicago triathlon, and they are just top-notch.”
Of course, there are some Sigma Chi connections to work done by A Long Swim and the Chicago River swim. “Kirk Hartley ’79.5 participated in some of the organization’s swims. I got a call from a guy who was four years ahead of me, Steve Sarovich ’75. Even though he had graduated by the time I arrived on campus, he was around Champagne and was always underfoot while I was in school,” Doug laughed. “He and his wife Sheila came to the Chicago event. Doug Wilson ’75 came in from Denver to kayak and help with the event. The fact that Dougger wanted to come in and help, that was really special.”
Just a week after the successful, inaugural Chicago River swim, Doug and A Long Swim are focused on the future. “We are already planning for 2026.”