Storm Forecast for November 13th, 2024

Winter Session

With over 200 swimmers involved in the upcoming winter session, there are a lot of moving parts.  To all those that registered early to help us with our planning, thank you!  For those of you who see a 15 week winter session and think it’s a bit too tall a lift, feel free to talk with me about options.

Practice Changes

Monday will start the beginning of the winter session.  It has slight changes to most groups as we get different pool availability and a larger swimmer load than in the fall.  Dryland details have been added for Cyclone, Tsunami, Typhoon, Senior, and Performance groups.  One big change will be the access to East Madison Hospital’s 4 lane pool.

This pool, built as part of the Sports Medicine portion of the UW Health East Side Campus, looks lovely.  The one issue we’ll deal with: it doesn’t have access for spectator viewing.  So, like we did during COVID times, practices at this pool will be drop-off/pick-up.  If that ends up being a dealbreaker and you wish to not participate in the winter session, please let me know.  Otherwise, I think you’ll like the convenience (a much shorter drive than Fall River) and your swimmers will really like the pool itself.  Directions/details on the pool can be found here.

McFarland Meet

You know how we did our home meet, and we had 502 athletes and we thought “boy, that’s about as many athletes as a meet can hold?”  Then, we went to Verona and they had around 550 swimmers and we thought, “yeah, that’s too many swimmers.”  Well, McFarland is in two weeks.  And over the 2.5 days, they’re anticipating around 850 swimmers.  It is going to be…something.  Saturday looks to run especially long.  Not counting warmups, they’re looking at over eight hours of racing.  With no relays, swimmers will be doing 2 or 3 races in four hours.  I tell you this with an out.  McFarland is asking if anyone is willing to get off this full flight.  If you’re already signed up for the McFarland meet and want to skip attending for any reason, let me know by Friday night.  You will NOT be billed.  I’ll just remove you from the meet entirely, and you’ll have the weekend off and be the envy of all your neighbors.

12/1 Dual – Now Watertown Meet

Initially, we planned an intrasquad on 12/1 to swim some of our shorter events for swimmers.  However, it seems we’ve got a more elegant solution in just attending the Watertown Polar Plunge on that Sunday.  We anticipate this being a small meet, with Watertown, two other teams, and us.  If you’ve not been to this pool before, it’s not particularly “fast.”  But, for checking boxes off for IMR and IMX scores, trying new events, getting in and out fast—this meet is perfect.  So, for Tropical Storm, Cyclone, Tsunami, and Typhoon groups—this meet is now open for signup.

Holiday Woes

The second tentative dual meet we had on our calendar was a longer-race dual meet at our pool on 12/20.  This doesn’t seem to fit within the holiday plans of the district, so we’ve been denied the opportunity host on 12/20.  So, that begs the question—who’s willing to do a tiny drive before the holidays?  If we co-hosted a small, two-team dual the night of December 20^th at some place within 35 minutes (think: DeForest, Cambridge, Jefferson), would you be interested in having your swimmer compete?  Fill out this TWO question survey.  This would be targeted towards 10&U that would swim 100s of stroke, 11&O that would swim 200s of stroke.

Highway 19 Alliance

Some good news…we’ve been working with some local clubs to create a 4 team, 4 meet solution for each of our teams’ swimmers.  As head coaches, we’ve been seeing meets that are too big and cumbersome for quality experiences and we’ve had to turn in really early entry files and skip out on fun meet formats due to the demand around the area.  So to fix that, Watertown, Deforest, Storm, and (maybe) Waunakee are working to create the Highway 19 Alliance.  It would offer one meet per session, with just the four clubs, each with a different focus.  Teams would share the hosting burden and the revenue from the meets.  We’re looking at a cost of around $20-$25 per swimmer, all inclusive, to cover costs of pool rental, officials, all that fun stuff.

Practice Changes

Upcoming Events & Meets