This Week At NTN

Jason Roberts

Below is information for this week at NTN. Please read over the information as it contains important information.


Cancelled Practices
Many of you know during the fall we have multiple water polo tournaments and swim meets that affect our practice schedule. Below are the dates for October. We appreciate everybody’s patience and understanding as we work through the water polo season.                           

Oct. 13th  
Oct. 18th   
Oct. 25th  
October 31st - Halloween

Website Is A One Stop Shop For Information
We have received emails lately for people looking for information about meet schedule, meet information, billing and up to date news information. The website(not the sports engine app) is the place to find all information you need. Please take a moment and explore the website. Once we have updated information, we make sure it is posted on the website.

MAC Meet Wrap-up
Congratulations to all who competed in this weekend’s meet in Mansfield. Our swimmers did a nice job improving on their best times with new time standards being achieved in all ages. We swam nearly at 80% best times in the meet as a team!! Keep up the work.
We are still having some issues on swimmers showing up late for warm-ups. Please have your swimmer at the meet based on the arrival time that is posted on the meet page on our website.
We have updated the time standard achieved document that is posted on our website. It is located at the top of the website in the toolbar.

Swimmer Of The Month
We would like to recognize our Swimmer of the Month for September. This award is given to a swimmer in each of our Junior groups and our Age Groups. We are very proud of these swimmers as they have shown, effort, attitude, improvement, and commitment and team spirit.

Junior 1a - Advik Kandula                                     Junior 1b - Olivia Byrnes
Junior 2a - Sophia Larsen Zarzosa                      Junior 2b – Maddy Ditty
Junior 3a - Axel Grisz                                           Junior 3b - Jackson Burgett
Age Group 1 - Ivy Huang                                     Age Group 2 – Lissi Kang
Age Group 3 – April Li

Water Bottles Are Required
Many swimmers are showing up to practice without water bottles. Please have your swimmers’ water bottles marked with their name.

Swimmers Shirts   
This week we will be working on getting the shirts out to the swimmers who have not received their shirts yet. We still have a few people without shirts.
Please remember these are the shirts that swimmers should be wearing to ALL swim meets.
Friday – White Shirt                   Saturday – Black Shirt              Sunday – Navy Shirt  

7 Reasons Every Swimmer Should Go to Swim Meets
Swim meets are a little unforgiving when viewed in a certain manner. You spend months training a countless number of hours, only to have your performance completed in a manner of minutes, with no recourse if you disagree with the numbers on the scoreboard.

But on the other hand, they are also places where swimmers learn the value of hard work, of setting and chasing goals, and other life skills including dealing with setbacks, developing sportsmanship, to even just broing down with your fellow swimmers.

Here are 7 reasons every swimmer should go to swim meets:

1. Sportsmanship. In competitions we learn the value of sportsmanship. There is value in waiting for other swimmers to finish before hopping out of the pool after a race, of waiting and cheering on the competition struggling to complete their own race. Watching young swimmers behave in this way is not only educational for other swimmers, but heartening and inspirational for the rest of us.

2. Teaches swimmers to set goals and make a plan to crush ‘em. Swim meets provide the opportunity for swimmers to work towards a specific goal. Which requires them to make a plan to achieve it, something that will translate well to whatever they choose to do outside of the pool.

3. Learning to cope with disappointments. They swam their little heart out, crashed into the wall in a flurry of arms and splash, spun around to see their time—and their face instantly fell. Either they lost the race they wanted to win, came short of breaking their personal best, or their goggles filled up with water right off the dive. Swimming is a microcosm of life; sometimes things simply don’t fall into place the way we want or expect. Realizing that things won’t always go our way and understanding that the path forward is one we must pave, is a lesson that will come in handy during all stages of life.

4. It is the ultimate feedback for how you train. Piling up the miles and going in-practice bests are awesome and can help keep you motivated and excited about training. However, to get a full idea of where your skills and abilities rack up, you gotta get up on the blocks. It’s difficult to fake the nerves and adrenaline you get in the moments before your race, and more importantly, once your race is over you not only get a clear idea of just how fast you can go, but you can figure out where you can improve most moving forward.

5. Teaches the value of hard work. The most dangerous swimmer in the pool can often be found with the silver medal around his or her neck. Coming that close to winning, close enough that they can taste it, often acts as the jet fuel to higher performance. Having come so close, our runner-up will double down on their effort and commitment in the pool so that they never have to suffer the indignity of losing again.

6. Gives you the opportunity to redefine your limits. There is nothing quite like swimming faster than you ever have. That feeling of looking up at the scoreboard and seeing a number faster than you thought was possible of yourself. When you shave a heap of time off of your best time your per-conceived limits are forever altered. You now expect more and better from yourself.

7. Camaraderie. Although swimming is a hybrid individual/team sport, the swim meet is a decidedly team atmosphere. Whether it is taking a coach bus together, painting the sides of the vans with inspirational sayings, or even flying cross country together, swim meets bring athletes together. Teammates cheer for one another, screaming themselves hoarse even though they have a final of their own to swim shortly after, to swimmers from different teams cheering on an athlete who is having the swim of his or her life. A sense of kinship is inevitable when you go to battle together for a full weekend, each chasing the outer limits of what is possible.

 

 

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to your coaches: