Welcome to the 2019-20 Season

Dear IST Families,

It is my great pleasure to welcome you all to the 2019-2020 competitive year with Issaquah Swim Team! To those of you joining us for the first time, I say hello and welcome to the Sockeye Family. To those of you returning, I say welcome back and welcome home.

The beginning of the season is one of my favorite parts of the year. Everything feels new and exciting, many possibilities lie ahead, and it’s easy to be optimistic about the future. Swimmers return to practice (or begin for the first time!) energized, enthusiastic, and willing to work hard. Coaches celebrate the chance to get to work making changes and improvements while continuing to nurture habits that lead to success. Parents approach every practice and look forward to every meet confident that nothing will stop their swimmer from attending, enjoying, and improving.

I relish the first few days and weeks of the year because they tend to feel so different from what we accept as “the usual.” Different not because swimmers, coaches, and parents shouldn’t keep the same attitudes that they have at the start, but different because we all find it difficult to do so.

You’ll often hear it said that swimming, perhaps more than any other sport, is a marathon and not a sprint. If parents and coaches do our jobs correctly, we have the potential to impart a life-long love for spending time in the water, build healthy habits, and foster great people who will carry their passion and positive experiences forward far into the future. Our challenge is to embrace that perspective, take the long view, and remember that the most important things we can do for each other and the swimmers in our care consist of having confidence in the vision of our team and coaches, pacing ourselves in terms of our demands and expectations, and tending the fire of each athlete’s passion for the sport in a sustainable and constructive manner. Doing so will help us keep that first-day-feel a little longer!

We worked hard in the offseason to retool our program in a way that would contribute to the execution of our mission, vision, and core values. Significant changes included reducing the average number of swimmers per group, expanding the number and variety of our training squads to accommodate our growing membership, rethinking the dryland experiences of athletes across the program, and onboarding new staff from a variety of backgrounds who share our coaching philosophy but can bring fresh ideas, perspectives, and toolkits to our team. I welcome the chance to hear your feedback on these and other changes as we progress through the year.

At the Dive In party yesterday I briefly touched on my goals for our team this season. First, I want to encourage us all to establish and reinforce connections amongst and between athletes, coaches, and parents. This might be done through as simple a mechanism as introducing yourself to a new face or sharing a kind word. Second, I want us to build on those connections to develop and enhance our community. As we multiply the connections that bind us, we invoke a sense of belonging, camaraderie, and support that will strengthen us all. Lastly, I want those connections and the community we shape to feed the confidence we have in each other and our direction as a team. By knowing who we are and what we stand for, and demonstrating conviction in those ideas, each member of IST becomes an ambassador for our program in the greater swimming environment.

I look forward to working with each and every one of you this year in pursuit of these goals, in support of our mission, vision, and core values, and in the joy of developing champions in the pool and champions in life. Please know that my door is always open to your ideas, suggestions, questions, comments, and concerns.

Swim fast, have fun, and go Sockeyes!


Tim Kearney