“We have a swim team?” said sophomore Riley Koch with a look of surprise on his face.
Koch’s shock at the fact that Northwood has a water sport is not uncommon. Swim team is arguably one of the least known sports teams at Northwood.
Part of the reason for its ambiguity is the traditionally small size of the swim team. Last year, seven of the team’s nine members graduated. This left coach Lyn Smith with just two members to start the season: senior Joshua Conger and junior Sarah Helen Shepherd. After three days of tryouts, she had 14 members that were eligible and registered to swim.
“This is our largest swim team on record,” Smith said.
Because of the increasing size of the team, many of the swimmers believe that there will be a lot more collaboration.
“We are going to be more team oriented instead of swimming with different teams,” Shepherd said.
Many questions from students arise when talking about the Northwood swim team, and the most common is where they practice. Without a pool of their own, the swim team practices with East Chapel Hill High School at the Homestead Aquatic Center in Chapel Hill.
Practice is mandatory Monday through Thursday, but there is an optional practice on Friday which is popular with members. For the first 10 minutes of practice, swimmers take a short jog to improve their endurance, then, for around 90 minutes, they do drills and learn technique in the water. Lastly the members participate in core strengthening out of the pool.
“If your core isn’t strong, you’re not going to be able to support it in the water,” Smith said, “Swimming is unlike any other sport. You can’t train on land for swimming other than strengthening your core; you have to be in the water.”
Senior Taylor Hendriksma started swimming when she was six and has been swimming competitively for eight years.
“More people should probably get into swimming; even if you start your freshman year, you can still letter and maybe get to states by your junior or senior year,” Hendriksma said. “It’s an all-around great workout.”
Like other traditional sports, swim team has given students from Northwood scholarship opportunities. Class of 2015 graduate Bailey Revels is currently at North Carolina State University for diving, and fellow graduate Rory O’Dell attends Saint Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, NY for swimming.
I think that diving doesn’t define me; it isn’t who I am, but it is a large part of who I’ve become,” Revels said. “It’s taught me self-discipline, trust, how to trust in others. It’s taught me a lot of life lessons that I would not have learned or not valued as much if I didn’t participate in swimming or diving.”
More recently, senior Joshua Conger committed to St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, Minnesota for a swimming scholarship.
Conger is a stand out member of Northwood’s swim team. Conger was a finalist at 2014-15 North Carolina 3A State Championship and is ranked 40th in the state of North Carolina. In Conger’s opinion, the dedication swimmers have is different than other sports.
“Swimming requires more commitment than any other sport,” Conger said. “If you miss a day of football or basketball, then you don’t get better. If you miss a day of swimming, you get worse.”
Shepherd shares a similar opinion in regards to the dedication swimming requires.
“It’s really good for time management; you really have to learn to prioritize” Shepherd said. “You have to spend such a sheer amount of time swimming, and in the end, there’s not a lot of time for homework.”
Smith has several goals for the swim team this year.
“[I’m] just excited to try and get Northwood’s swim team off the ground and to try to make an impact at states so everyone knows Northwood’s swimming as one of the best programs around,” Smith said.
– By Ava Johnson