October 6 update: Bellingham meet results, Wednesday practice, and Friday Practice
Good morning Tritons,
We are back from another meet, and I have some updates for you all:
Firstly, congratulations to our 14 swimmers for collectively swimming 28 best times last weekend! Our biggest time drop of the competition goes to Marie Long with an 11 second drop in the 100 Free! Meet ran great, and our new swimmers did an awesome job with their first time. We also had Weston Weishaar qualify for Y Regionals in the 200 IM!
There will be a couple of upcoming practices this week that will be off of our normal schedule:
Wednesday, October 8th will be a combined practice from 4:30-6:00 for all practice groups. Swimmers should be there a little bit before 4:30 so that I can make groups, as this will be a mentor swim day. For those that are newer, mentor swim days are practices where our older and more experienced swimmers will be giving feedback and advice to newer swimmers. Coaches will decide the techniques, and help mentors develop their leadership and instructional skills. These days have been very helpful for our younger swimmers each time, and I hope to schedule these at least once a month!
Friday, October 10th will also be a combined practice for our Riptide and Tsunami A/B groups from 4:30-5:30pm. This is in preparation for the Hazen meet on Saturday. Hazen will be a bigger meet, and we will want to make sure we are rested up for it!
(Side note: The preliminary timeline I received shows that the 10&U group starts warm ups at 9am and they finish their session around 1pm. The 11&O group starts warm ups around 1pm and finishes their session around just after 5pm. The host is making some changes to save time in the second session (canceling our older relays, combining a couple of events), so we are are all waiting to see the final version that will come out hopefully tonight. I will send more information to those that had registered in the next couple of days.)
The next YMCA meets that will count towards Y State eligibility will be in November and December. Please stay tuned for those events when I post them, especially if your swimmer needs more Y meets to qualify! Y State is our flagship championship meet, and it will be at the King County Aquatic Center, site of last year's D1 Swimming Championships and many other high level swimming competitions. It is the best pool in the Northwest, so I hope we can get as many swimmers there as possible!
Thank you to those that have reached out about the officials trainings, I appreciate your support and dedication to our young Tritons swimmers! We still could use more help, so please don't hesitate to reach out to me if you have any questions at all. No swimming background required; many of you are more knowledgeable than you think just being around the sport! I previously mentioned that the officials training for YMCA is ages 21+, but they had reduced this to 18+ earlier this year. This also matches the USA Swimming officials age limit of 18+ to become an official.
As always, I appreciate you all and look forward to what comes next!
Joseph Shelly
