Swimming Girls Dive to Success

By Daniella Salvatore

The 54 girls that were on the Girls Hills Varsity Swimming and Diving team have helped contribute to the team's popularity at both West and East. A few years ago, students and faculty members alike did not even know the school had a swimming team, but now they are more than well aware. The team has always been a collaboration of both West and East because there were never enough swimmers to make two separate teams and a junior varsity high school team (the junior varsity consists of middle school swimmers). It was also incapable to have cuts.

Coach Jason has always accepted anyone as long as the swimmer knew the basic strokes and could keep up during practice. However, the number of girls that show up to the welcoming meeting in the beginning of the season greatly increases every year. The team has come a long way with the 2008 season having the largest amount of girls on the team, 54, 22 of which are seniors. This may have to do with swimming's new found popularity due to the Olympics this year and super-athlete Michael Phelps.

Having so many girls on the team leads to chaos and absolute insanity at certain times throughout the season. Because Coach Jason thought he had a large team last year, which consisted of 15 fewer swimmers, he asked Coach Jen, a teacher at East, to coach diving so he could strictly coach the swimmers. Swim meets were crazy at times trying to tell the girls who were in which event and to make sure everybody was doing what they were supposed to be doing. Obviously, with 54 girls on the team, not every swimmer competed in every meet. This left a lot of girls on the bench especially when on average only 3 swimmers were in the pool at one time. However, that leaves 51 girls to be cheering their team on.

The Girls Hills Varsity Swimming and Diving team received one of the highest ratings for sportsmanship every single season. You would think with this many girls there would be a lot of cat fighting, but it was the complete opposite. Everyone was friends with each other and helped each other out a lot. There were a lot of times when the swimmers had the chance to bond and get closer to other girls on the team, especially if they were in your lane during practice. It has also given the team the chance to get to know some of the girls from the other high school. There is a system called little and big sisters where in the start of the season the captains assign everybody a partner. This is when seniors and juniors are paired up with sophomores and freshmen and on certain swim meets the little sister brings the big sister food, or vice versa. The little and big sister system helps to eliminate the boundary of thinking the upperclassmen are superior.

There were also 4 captains picked for this year's season to help keep everything under control. Although having this size of a team was fun and something different than the ordinary, Coach Jason announced at the end of the season that he will be making cuts next year. Even though this is a bad thing for the swimmers, it is a good thing for the swimming team as a whole to show that we have grown to the extent to which we have to make cuts. Maybe a few years down the line there will even be two separate East and West teams and they can compete against each other.