Pacific Swimming
Excellence 200

PASA - MP: Weekly Update - 8/18/25

Bruce Smith

I hope everyone is settling into school and getting into their fall routines.  On September 2, we will be starting the 2025-26 season, with optional pre-season workouts starting August 26.  

You may have noticed that there have not been any updates over the last two weeks.  These last two weeks the staff took their vacations and we were working on some exciting changes for this upcoming year. The changes were just finalized this past Sunday.  Below are the changes for the upcoming year

1) Welcome to our staff two new coaches - Dave Kershaw (formerly for PASA - Alpine) and Danny Dye (head swim coach for Palo Alto high school and a middle school PE teacher).  We will do a more formal introduction to these new coaches in our next update. 

2) Adjustments to Age Group Program - Our current team is around 130 swimmers.  Of those swimmers roughly, 60% are between the ages of 9-13 (55% between 9-12). We have a total of around 70 swimmers who have signed up for tryouts, of which about 20 will make our team.  57% of those tryouts are between the ages of 9-12.  
This is a long winded way of saying that the majority of our swimmers fall into AG2 & AG1.  To improve our offerings for these swimmers, we are going to introduce a third group to our Age Group program, and revamp our Varsity group to target more swimmers. The Age Group program will be renamed to Albacore, Yellowfin, Bluefin (the swimmers have been wondering why they cannot get a cool group name like Mighty Minnows).  
- Albacore will be similar to our current AG2 program (Coach Dave)
- Yellowfin will be between our current AG2 & AG1 program (Coach Danny)
- Bluefin will be similar to our AG1 program (Coach Zach)
This will require some changes to the groups you are currently in as they are different now.  We hope that transition will be smooth, but we suspect there will be hiccups and it will take a few weeks to get completely ironed out.  Thanks for your patience with figuring this out.  We will spend Pre-Season for making communications.  
 
3) Preseason Practice Schedule (8/26 - 8/29) - we will begin pre-season practices on Tuesday, August 26.  The Pre-season schedule will be a modified schedule
            Tues (8/26)    5:30 - 6:30.   Current AG2
                                  6:00 - 7:15  Current AG1
                                 6:00 - 7:30. Pre-Senior/Senior
           Wed (8/27).   5:30 - 6:10.  Mighty Minnows
                                 5:30 - 6:30. Current AG1
                                 6:00 - 7:15. Current AG2
                                 6:00 - 7:30.  Pre-Senior/Senior
                                 6:30 - 7:30.  Varsity
          Thurs (8/28)    5:30 - 6:30.   Current AG2
                                 6:00 - 7:15  Current AG1
                                 6:00 - 7:30. Pre-Senior/Senior
                                 6:30 - 7:30 Varsity
         Fri (8/29).        5 :30 - 6:10.  Mighty Minnows
                                 5:30 - 6:30. Current AG1
                                 6:00 - 7:15. Current AG2
                                 6:00 - 7:30.  Pre-Senior/Senior
 
4) Fall Season Practice starting 9/2/25 - 
             Mighty Minnows.      MWF.       5:15 - 6:10pm
             Albacores.                MWF       5:20 - 6:30pm
                                              TTh.         5:20 - 7:00pm
            Yellowfin.                   MTTh.      5:00 - 6:45pm
                                              WF.           5:20 - 6:45pm
            Bluefin.                      MWF.        5:30 - 7:30pm
                                              TTh.          5:00 - 7:00pm
          Varsity.                       TThF.         7:00 - 8:00pm  
Pre-Senior.                  M-F.          5:45 - 8:00pm
                                              Sat.         7:00 - 9:00am (Belle Haven)
            Senior.                       MTWTh. 5:45 - 8:00pm
                                              Sat.         7:00 - 9:00am (Belle Haven)
                              
Lots of info here.  Please take time to read through it all.  There is undoubtedly a lot of questions about which group my swimmers will be in. We will be working on that next week during pre-season to put your swimmer in the best place for them and for the team.