Girls Swim and Dive Regular Season Recap
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As the season comes to an end, Waukee swimming and diving has had multiple victories as a team, and they are now preparing for State championships.
Diving and swimming practices are six days a week for about one to two hours. During the beginning of the season, diving girls work on improving and learning the basic fundamentals of dives. As their first meet at Ankeny started getting closer, the girls began learning new dives. Learning new dives is one of the most stressful and scary parts of the season.
Sophomore Bailey Mahoney said, “Diving is such a mental sport that getting over fears of throwing new dives and pushing through mental blocks when your mind is telling you you’re gonna smack your face on the board is really hard, and you still have to do the dive and trust you are going to be fine.”
Through the learning process of the new dives, the girls made sure to be there and support one another. Supporting each other was especially important this year as the team grew with all of the new freshmen. The freshmen are not usually all able to compete because they are required to have six legal dives for JV. However, a big victory for the team, all of the freshmen were able to compete.
Junior Avery Winter stated, “The upperclassmen have been able to push and almost coach all of the freshmen. Being able to compete all at a meet has been a big accomplishment.”
Now that divers had learned all of their dives, they were able to put them to use in the meets. Dual meets occur on Tuesdays and invitational meets occur on Saturdays. At dual meets, three varsity divers, three JV divers and two to three exhibition divers are able to compete. This allows everyone to get the chance to dive at some point in the season. At the Johnston meet, two divers– Avery Winter and Bailey Mahoney– broke the previous school record, and Mahoney took home the win.
Next, the divers focused their training mostly on repetition and perfecting their dives. Strategically watching every dive helps improve their scores for the following meets and championships coming up.
As the swimming season started, the swimming girls started with long, smooth swimming to help them get back in shape. Following that, they started with lots of drills and building muscle memory for the upcoming meets. One of the most important things they do during pre-season training is learn their perfect stroke, which is essential for a good swim.
As meets and competition started getting closer, the swim girls started working on putting everything together in order to make the races and relays. This includes them working on their speed and turns. They have pre-meet practices the morning before each dual meet to help prepare and get them ready for their races and relays. For the upperclassmen, it can be hard to balance out the late-night school work and the early morning practice.
Junior Athieno Wandera expressed, “Waking up and staying on top of going to swim and be able to get motivated to go to swim practice in the morning [is a big challenge] .”
The swimming girls accomplished a lot so far in the season. They have won all of the meets and invites. Not only did they just win, but they won together as a team. They have made sure to do plenty of team bonding activities including the team sleepover. Doing team bonding activities has brought the team closer together and allowed the upperclassmen to learn about the freshmen and their interests.
To prepare for state, the girls have been doing lots of exchanges for relays and getting in the right mindset for competition. Continuing on they have also been weightlifting and conditioning to strengthen their body. Strengthening and conditioning your body is extremely important because swimming uses lots of your body components.
Wandera stated, “Now I am really looking into the details of swimming, and how I can really work on getting a little faster, working on my little things, asking for feedback and always communicating.”
The team looks forward to the state meet on November 10 and 11.