Ready for This Weekend? In 2023, we had our first Spring Scramble Meet—279 athletes, 90 were Storm. Last year, 366 athletes, 96 were Storm. This year: 443 athletes, 115 are Storm. Whoa! Add to that our largest golf scramble total for Sunday, and we’ve got ourselves a pretty big weekend for a lot of people! Whether you’re swimming, golfing, or supporting the events—thank you! Breaking records like this is really, really fun and we couldn’t do it without you. Last Weekend Speaking of records broken, we had our largest Open...

Another Busy Weekend… This weekend, Wisconsin Swimming will be hosting its annual meetings at the Kalahari Resort at the Dells. We’ll be down a coach Friday PM as I’m on the Board of Directors. Saturday, Storm will be opening up the lazy river to practice open water swimming at 8am. We’ve got 30 Storm swimmers signed up along with some swimmers from Ashwaubenon. Be sure to bring your gear bags! Following that, over EIGHTY swimmers, siblings, friends, and family members will be turned loose on the waterpark at 10am. For...

Swim School Challenge Recap Thanks to the waves of volunteers that helped make our second Swim School Challenge a big hit. I’ve heard from directors of the swim schools and families, and its received wonderful feedback. These types of events make a huge difference for the swim schools, the sport of swimming, and our club specifically. Thank you! Capital Campaign With less than two weeks to go for our Capital Campaign, we’ve snuck past $5,500. We won’t continue to run this event forever—the plan is to go back to “regular...

Getting our Fifteen Minutes of Fame So, four braggy things to share about the team right now that we can *all* take a bit of pride in… USA Swimming reached out to us over the break. They identified 88 teams among the ~2600 clubs in USA Swimming that were “impressive” with their retention of both 11-12s and 13-14s. We were one of them! Essentially, they’re wanting to know how we’re doing it and what we can teach them and other teams. At the banquet, I mentioned our IMS program gaining...

Spring Session Numbers Boy, this spring turned into a *very* pleasant surprise. It looks like our final number will be 187 for this session, SMASHING our previous spring record. Thank you so much for joining us for a spring that’s packed with opportunities and adventures. Parent Practice Tomorrow morning is our second Parent Practice. The event will run from 9:00-9:45A at Sun Prairie EAST. No signup for this one, just come join--bring goggles, a suit, and towel. You don’t need to be a great swimmer or even a very good...

Fish Fry Thank You’s Looking at the pre-event volunteer list for Friday, we were super concerned that we might not be able to properly staff the fish fry. Lo and behold, we had swimmers, we had parents, we had siblings, we had coach’s husbands…you name it, we had it. We filled the roles as they came, and an event that looked ominous during presale ended up with over 400 meals sold. Thanks to each and every one of you that made something, took a to-go order, made an order, filled...

A SUPER Busy Newsletter We’ve got our last championship meet happening right now followed by a break from action, but you’d never know from all the events coming up. There’s a lot of content in this one, so break it into pieces! Capital Campaign In the decade I’ve been here, we’ve only done two fundraisers where we just flat out…ask, for money. The first happened in 2017--we were working on ways to make Fall River’s pool more practice-friendly with lane ropes, acoustic paneling, backstroke flags, and a pace clock. The...

The Importance of the Offseason Erin & I were talking about sermon content for this week and landed on the need for breaks in swimming. There is a LOT of content focused on the benefits of getting out of the pool for a bit. A scientific report here. A great Swimswam piece here. A great mix of expert and opinion here. And several SwimmingWorld articles on a quick search. But the short version of all of these: yes, swimmers will take a step or two back in conditioning. But, that’s...

Meet Hosting A quick personal thing: I was talking to the Head Coach of BAC yesterday. They’re in the middle of hosting meets on two straight weekends, much like we did the last two weeks. The poor guy sounds as though he’s going THROUGH it. Contrast that to our experience…where many, many hands made lighter work. I just wanted to thank all the parents who step in to do so many roles, for so many hours, for the betterment of our swimmers and our club. The way you handle yourselves...

Siblings in Swimming Since 2014, we’ve had no less than 111 sets of siblings on Storm (not counting twins, including the FOUR sets of twins we currently have on the roster). In those 111 sets, there have been some general themes: in 90% of cases, the younger sibling was the better athlete. There have been studies done about this phenomenon, because it’s seen across many sports. The TL;DR version of this: every day that the little sibling is working to keep up with their big brother or sister, they’re getting...