In recent week the Hawkeye has conducted an interview with Alta Swim Team member: Hannah Bemel. Here is her responses to why you should join the swim team.
1. What happens in the Alta swim team?
“The main thing that happens with the Alta swim team is practices and meets but it goes beyond just that. The team really becomes like your family. Practices typically run 3pm-5pm Mon-Thurs and 1pm-3pm on Fri. We rarely ever do Saturday. I don’t think we did any this year. We used to consistently do Saturday practices but there was a change in the coaching staff this past year and Coach K did away with the Saturday practices.”
2. Why should I join the swim team?
“You should join the swim because:
It’s an amazing opportunity to make friends. I’ve met some of my best friends on the swim team. You also become friends with people across all the grade levels and it’s great.
The coaches are great. Coach K is one of the best coaches I’ve ever had. She’s also really understanding when you have conflicts with meets and practices. I had a conflict this year with a swim meet and a debate tournament. I ended up choosing to go to the debate tournament and she was extremely understanding. The same was true for when I had to miss practices. I had a few times where practice conflicted with a dress rehearsal for choir and again she was extremely understanding. The same is true when it comes to restrictions due to injuries. For example I can’t do the Butterfly stroke due to back issues and when I told her at the beginning of the season I fully expected her to give me a hard time about it like the previous coach would have but she just said “OK whenever we do fly during practice you can just do Freestyle.” and she actually remembered throughout the entire season and never questioned when I was doing Freestyle during practice and she never put me in any IM or Butterfly events during the season. The assistant coaches Hallie and Jack are genuinely some of the best people I’ve ever met. They always made me laugh whenever they were running practice.
It’s a great full body workout. It doesn’t matter what your main stroke is whether it’s Breastroke, Backstroke, Butterfly or Freestyle, swim is an amazing full body workout and you get crazy muscle definition.
The team dinners are so much fun! After each home meet we do a team dinner where people bring different things (usually pasta) or pizza and we do dinner as a team before we all go home. The craziest things happen at team dinners. I remember my friend brought her little dog to one team dinner, and at another after dinner we all went and raced each other around the track.
Swim as a sport is unique in the fact that yes you’re goal is to score points and win for the team but you’re also constantly competing with yourself to drop time and get a new PR (Personal Record) so while yes you are competing against another team you’re really mainly competing against yourself and the coaches recognize that fact so they are always celebrating improvements even if we don’t win the meet which rarely happens. This year we won most of our meets. I think we only lost to Skyline and we might have lost to Corner Canyon.”
3. What are some tips for people looking to join the swim team?
“Some tips for people looking to join swim team are:
Have a generally open schedule at least during the winter
Swim is a fair time commitment as I mentioned earlier practices are 2 hours.
Do weights and strength training on your own time
Swim is a great way to build muscle but it’s mainly cardio and endurance training so to avoid injury I highly suggest doing weights and strength training on your own time.
STRETCH
This applies to you wether you’re already on the team or you’re looking to join the team. Swim causes ridiculously tight muscles if you don’t stretch and it can lead to a whole host of health complications trust me, I’ve done swim team for all 3 years and plan to do it all 4 years of high school and during my Freshman and Sophomore years we had a swim coach who didn’t consider stretching to be that important so we didn’t do it before practicing, and now I’m a Junior with ridiculously tight muscles 2 different versions of tendinitis (Achilles/Patellar) and chronic knee pain. I think the only reason the pain didn’t get to the point of me having quit swim was because Coach K spends the first 15 minutes of every practice stretching.”
4. How do you like the swim team?
I love being on the swim team. As I mentioned earlier I’ve met some of my best friends on the swim team, the coaches are some of the best people I know, and I love the competition not only the competition against other teams but also against myself. When you dive into the water for a race everything quiets and it’s you and the water and your mind is focused on one thing and one thing only: “swim fast”. Any stress I have from school or life or anything disappears for the time I’m in the water.
5. Where can someone join the team?
“Tryouts for the swim team are typically in October. We hold all our practices, home meets and everything at Dimple Dell Recreation Center which is just a couple minutes walk away from Alta.
*Info From Coach*
Placing Info and Records Broken:
It was a fantastic season of the 11 dual meets we lost 3. We had 5 records broken 200 Medley Relay: Blake Abney, Noah Stout, Sawyer Mortensen, and Ilyan Manriquez. Blake broke the 200 IM and 100 Breast, Noah Stout broke the 100 Breast at Region and then Blake broke it again at State. Ilyan broke the 50 Free, and then the 200 Freestyle Relay was broken by Sawyer, Orion Gray, Quinn Beeny, and Ilyan Manriquez. Boys took 4th in State and girls 8th.”
Another special thanks to Hannah Bemel who this article would not be possible without.
