It’s swim season and Girls started on October 23 while the boys started on November 6. A season is 15 weeks long. They are currently in need of male divers, but they are looking good for everything else.
Coach Jeffrey Eddy has been coaching swimming for 38 years and this is his twenty sixth year coaching for Anderson High School. He coaches the swim team and he wants to be sure everyone is a great competitive swimmer.
“We have a lot of new faces, combined with some faces that are people that have been here before. We’re spending a lot of time doing stroke development, different aspects that will make them into competitive swimmers, we have several people that are new to competitive swimming so I see a lot of improvement so far and hopefully this will be a season of improvement,” Eddy said.
Ava Nickleson, who is a swim captain, has been a competitive swimmer for 6 years and she loves the sport.
“Swimming is an amazing sport,” Nickleson said. “I found a passion for it and did not want to let it go. It’s very challenging yet rewarding in so many ways.” Ava is very positive and has a lot of great things to say about the swim team.
“I absolutely love my team. You create huge bonds doing something hard together. The locker room chats and the bus ride memories are unmatched”.
Another swimmer on the team is Wura Olorunfemi. She is a competitive swimmer who has been swimming for six years.
“I’ve always enjoyed swimming and i’m competitive and swim gives me the chance to do both,” said Olorunfemi.
Eddy believes swimming is a very difficult sport because of the mental and physical strain on the body.
“It is a full body workout, so it is very difficult to do,” Eddy said. “You’ve got to have a good mindset because it’s very repetitive. You’ve got to be tough mentally. The mental aspect of the sport is so difficult, because it is so physically taxing and you’ve gotta be strong minded to be able to get through a practice.”
Olorunfemi and Nickleson agree on another difficult aspect of swimming: getting in the water to practice in the morning.
“The hardest part is having to wake up at 7.a.m. and jump in the freezing cold pool,” Nickleson said. “Morning practices are no fun but the post-practice breakfasts the parents cook for us makes it all worth it.”
The post-practice breakfasts are just one example of how tightly-knit the team is. They are constantly checking in on one another.
“I love competing and improving on my times, it’s very rewarding. I also have so much fun cheering on my teammates at meets and watching them improve too,” Olorunfemi said.
“I love all the swimmers on the team. We’re all pretty close in and out of school so the whole team feels like one big happy family.” She really enjoys spending time with her team and just hanging out with them. “My favorite part of swimming are the meet days and just getting to spend time with the team,” she said.
