How are you and the girls swim team preparing for the rest of the season?
“The next step of this season is just really introducing more aerobic, working out harder, better and faster and working on little technique things. We don't really get to the anaerobic side until about January or February, which is more of speed, trying to get the speed through with longer breaks. Right now we're doing more endurance, less breaks right now. So we're preparing there and the other side of this is mentally. We're really preparing mentally for a lot of this. We have a lot of young girls on the team, new swimmers, and we have to prepare for that, so the best way to prepare for that is just [to] teach them about meets, [and] help them learn what the aspect of preparing for a meet is, and that's been a lot of what we built right now for that foundation this year.”
What specifically are you working on to help the girls improve?
“Just meet etiquette, technique, where again, with a young team, the meet etiquette is a big part of that, how to prepare for meets, what to do at meets. We have a great senior class helping the younger new freshmen understand what that's about.”
How is coaching the girls different from coaching the boys?
“It is different sometimes teaching coaching boys and girls, especially at the same time. And their seasons start differently, so, we're kind of in different phases of training really, with the girls being two weeks ahead of the boys. You tried to do the best you can with trying to keep it somewhat similar, but sometimes, in the past boys work a little harder sooner, [and] sometimes girls work a little harder sooner. It's just you have to kind of judge the team, right? You just judge it by the team and go from there and to me, that's the best part about coaching is just trying to figure out where they are and how we have to adapt to what we're doing. It changes year to year.”
What do you hope to bring to the girls team this year?
“Changing the culture, right? The culture, letting them understand it's okay to work hard, it's okay to let yourself go and just be tired, and swim fast while you're tired, and changing that culture has been a big big thing for us here."
What are you looking forward to most the rest of this season?
“I wish I could show you the look on the girls' faces, I really do. The look on their faces after they do something they've never done before is phenomenal. Some of these girls have never even seen water until three weeks ago, they had never seen a pool or how to compete, you know what I mean? In the workouts we do, and just seeing the look on their faces when they do it is astonishing to me. I love it, and I can't wait to see what happens in February when you see the look on their face of what they've just done.”
After your team’s first two swim meets, what do you expect for the rest of this season?
“Continue success. Just individual success, team success. They're just getting better each meet individually. I've told them before, I don't really care too much about wins and losses on the meets coming up. The biggest meet that we're swimming for is Sectional and how we're going to compete there and how we're going to do there. We call it swimming through, so we're really going to work out really hard through all the meets. We're going to work out really hard through MIC and County, and that just means they're going to swim those meets a little bit more tired than they will when it comes time for Sectional.”