Meet Wrap and Moving Forward

 This past weekend our groups had great success at the meet, with a lot of personal best times recorded.  We want to thank all of you for such a great effort at the meet and all the months of hard work leading up to this past weekend.  All of you should be proud of the way you have handled all of the new challenges that have been placed in front of us this past year.

One of the areas that we need to keep working on is our crossover turns if we are going to use them in competition.  An official brought to my attention that we had some disqualifications on Saturday and as explained to me the problem is that we may be over rotating the body past 90 degrees before the hand actually hits the wall.  A BIG NO NO.  Apparently after talking with the referee all the DQ’s were pulled with the benefit going to you, the swimmer.  It’s something that we want you to be aware of as we continue to move forward and this may be a good time to just review the video and really pay attention to that first step.

We were very pleased with our underwater work off the wall and as with anything else this is an area that can always be improved upon.

Those streamlines with the dolphins off the wall are a great way to gain an advantage over your competition and picking up valuable speed off the turns. You are not only moving faster while underwater but more efficiently, but you have to know when it’s time to breakout on the surface.  To get that timing down takes a lot of work with repetition and that is why it is so important to treat every wall during practice like a race.  That’s the only way they will improve.  Don’t take that part of your race for granted.  A lot of you believe you are doing it during practice but it is hard for you to understand that you need to be very aggressive with every wall during our training sessions.

We know that it seems a little soon but we have to look forward to the meet in January and make a decision about which events to enter.  For our High School swimmers let’s not forget that if they can get the season going you all may have a dual meet sometime that weekend.  Our suggestion for you all is to pick one day to swim during our meet and pick events that you would not normally be doing.preferably longer events.  For the rest of you let’s think of this as a training meet and focus on events that you normally might not do.  Don’t be afraid of stepping out of you comfort zone when choosing events, you might be surprised with the results and in the end will actually help your best events when the time is right.