April Newsletter

LAC Families,

What a successful clinic this weekend!!  We were so lucky to have Miranda Tucker share some of her experiences with the kids.  Our kids were able to hold her medals from the Olympic Trials, World Championships, and two gold medals from the BIG10 Championship!  She conducted a one hour video session to start off the clinic and then a one hour in-water session where she got in the water with the kids to help them with their breaststroke.  It was awesome to see the kids so engaged!  We ended up having 59 kids attend from Lakeview Aquatic Club and Greater Kalamazoo Crocs.  I am hoping to have another clinic this year, so if you were not able to attend this event, please take advantage of the next one!  By the way, the $15 to attend is a steal of a deal!!  Miranda (as a professional swimmer) normally charges $110 per hour for her clinics.  Not to mention, the group had one of the best pulled pork lunches afterwards!  I'm not exaggerating...Fatty T's BBQ smoked 30+lbs of pork overnight on Friday and was fresh off the smoker Saturday morning to feed our 70’ish people.  It was amazing!

A couple of important notes as we push further into the spring and summer session:

#1 - Late start sign-up opens today.  Practices will begin May 13th!

#2 - We have our first meet this Saturday at Dewitt HS.  This is the first of our Sunshine Toyota Sprint Series League.  The specialty event is Backstroke at the meet.  Please sign-up, as the next big step in our program is to get more kids to attend the scheduled meets!  This should be the “fun” part of being on a competitive swimming team!!

#3 - The Arena Team Store is now open for business!!  Check out the command button on the right side of the screen of the website (swimlac.com). What a great addition to our program. By becoming an “Arena Team”, we get special deals on apparel and equipment throughout the year.  In addition to this, everything LAC families buy from Arena, we get 30% of all sales back in “value-in-kind” credit at the end of the year.  On top of this, Elsmore Swim Shop (our Arena Vendor) will give us another 10% back in credit on everything bought through the website (even non-Arena gear).  We would use these credits to buy team gear or apparel for the kids at the end of the year. The ultimate goal is to get our team “looking” like a team!!  I’m excited to see how professional our team looks over the next couple of years!!

#4 - Our Spring Tune-Up meet is coming up in about 4 weeks.  Although this is a smaller USA meet, a lot of help will be needed!  Please look at the job descriptions listed under this event and find something which fits your schedule on that day.  This is only a one day meet with a morning session and an afternoon session.  This meet is a great fundraiser for our program!

#5 - Speaking of Fundraising, Coach Fredenburg has once again placed our Lakeview Spartans Swimming Golf Outing the day after the Spring Tune-Up.  Nobody likes fundraising, but it is a necessary thing in order to run our current budget (and maintain our pool with state of the art equipment).  We have tried to make this as painless as possible, by hosting a Saturday swimming meet and a Sunday morning golf outing!!  In my opinion, things could be worse than hanging out at the pool and golfing:).  Although this golf outing is a LHS function and not an LAC sponsored event, you will find most of this money usually comes back to the same kids.  For example, last year Andy used money from the golf outing to buy the fins for the starting platforms (at $1400 a piece x 8 blocks = $11,200 investment).

Thanks for everyone’s continued support of this awesome program!

Go LAC,

Coach Lott