Hey All, it's the debut of winter session! Practice gets underway tonight with our regular schedule. A few things of note though: Typhoon Schedule Errors Somebody (me) made errors when putting the Typhoon schedule on the website. Affected include: Monday/Tuesday night practice, dryland. See below for correct details: Monday 6:50-8:10P at SP East Tuesday Dryland 5:30-6:20P at JJ's Boxing Tuesday 6:50-8:10P at SP East Wednesday 5:30-6:50A at SP East Wednesday 6:15-7:30P at SP West Thursday Dryland 5:30-6:20P at JJ's Boxing Thursday 7:20-8:40P at SP West Friday 5:30-6:50A at SP West...

Packing for Meets Like the battery of a cell phone left outside in January, an unprepared swimmer will drain quickly during a swim meet. We saw that a bit this weekend at MAC, with a cold pool deck catching kids off guard. The energy it takes to shiver is energy they won’t have to swim. It’s why you see NBA players with warmups on when on the bench, or Olympic level swimmers wearing a full warmup, shoes, and hats in the ready room before they compete. A swim bag should...

Winter Registration is Here! Only 10 days remain in the fall session. It has absolutely whizzed by. Returning family registration opened today. A couple things to note: pool access looks very different from last winter. Last winter we were preparing for the UW Health facility, a beautiful pool but one that was 60% more expensive than any of our other facilities while being the smallest and having no spectator access. Because of the limited time available this year plus the costs associated with it, we elected to forego that pool...

The Changing Leaves A bit of this is plagiarized from the Head Coach at Delta Aquatics (with her blessing of course), but it could not be more appropriate. We’re in that wonderful fall time now of peak fall foliage. But when you look closely, trees of the same species right beside each other might be in totally different stages. Some haven’t begun to turn, some are giving the beautiful oranges and reds that we love, while others still started changing long before the others. The same can be said for...

Storm Social Events While swimming is the biggest part of this team, a sense of community and belonging, making social connections is the framework that makes it all work. Kids will find that extra gear when they’re safe among friends. Families are more likely to help something grow when it’s more than just another sports team. We cultivate that culture through our actions in the pool and our events outside the pool. So while you might think a bowling or skating outing sounds small in the grand scheme, they all...

This Week’s Sermon: Short and Sweet Two things: #1 – Never, ever, ever use the SportsEngine app for meet signup. Countless times swimmers have been in wrong sessions, no sessions, or had admin errors when signed up on the app. Feel free to uninstall it. Use the website for everything, it’s why we attempted to make mobile-friendly buttons. #2 – I know folks have busy lives (and I’m long-winded), but please make sure you at least skim all the pieces in these newsletters. Example: we polled Tropical Storm families for...

Meet Recap There are always pros and cons to hosting meets versus going to someone else’s meet. It takes a lot more prep, including committee meetings, volunteer organization—tons of man (and woman) hours. As a coach, it’s significantly harder to be fully in the moment and watching races, because if something breaks it’s up to us to fix it (see: livestream). But, it does mean more of our kids come out and race, which is fantastic. And in our case, these meets become an excellent showcase of what our club...

Parents, 24 hours from now, we'll be knee-deep in heats of the 50 freestyle. It's time to start figuring out those final details for the Fall Kickoff. When Do I Get There? One of the overseen things on our website is where we keep the details for each meet. When you're on the homepage, scroll down to the Fall Kickoff event. Or, from the Event page, you can do the same. Click the title of the meet and a lovely little popup emerges. 1) Where to go --Pretty self-explanatory. Keep...

The First Sermon - Meet Selection Those of you who have been on the team a while have seen their share of my long form writings on random topics from siblings to the car ride home to intrinsic motivation. Rest assured, they don’t occur every week and not every one of them is applicable to all families. This week: the meet schedule. To start, a "History of Michael" tale. Young Michael, at the 11-12 age group, had just started swimming summer league in West Virginia. The relay team of himself,...

Getting Involved As we’re getting closer to our first official meet of the season, new families will start to realize the number of moving parts, the scale of our meets, and the wide variety of volunteers we have working to make a great experience for coaches, parents, officials, and swimmers alike. There’s a role for everyone, whether you’re a seasoned pro at swim meets or you’ve never seen one before this year. A few roles I wanted to bring to your attention: Officials – If you’re familiar with what the...