The girls swimming and diving team stepped up to its first event at the Hersey Invite excitedly wearing neon-colored clothes and wigs.
“It was this meet where you did a dance at the beginning, you got judged on it, and then we did the meet, so it was really fun,” said junior Liv Samson. “It was such a great team bonding exercise that we could do together.”
Beforetheinvite, eachcompeting school choreographed a dance that was performed on land. The dance was judged by the Hersey homecoming court but did not impact the official meet scores.
The team placed eighth at the Hersey Invite. As of Oct. 26, the team has an overall record of 4-4 and a conference record of 2-3.
“We’ve got one of the toughest conferences in Illinois,” said head swimming coach Jarod Schroeder. “Out of our 12 [schools] that are in the Central Suburban League, I think usually five or six are in the top 15 in the state. So, every week we can be a really good team and not have a great record in our conference.”
According to senior Aislinn Barry, the team has a really strong culture.
“Everybody kind of supports each other, and even if I feel down about my swimming or anything else, those other girls on my team, they’re gonna notice and they’re there to support me,” Barry said.
Swimmers and divers who are not currently competing sometimes stand on the edge of the pool to cheer on their teammates at meets.
“When I take a stroke and I breathe, I see that my teammates are lined up and cheering for me with my coach,” said Samson. “It just motivates me more to go fast because I’m not only doing it for myself. I’m doing it for my team too.”
According to Schroeder, the team currently has divers in training, but in order to compete in a dual meet divers must be able to legally complete six different dives, and as the season progresses, the degree of difficulty of those dives gets harder.
The team does not currently have any competing divers, meaning they automatically start off each meet 13 points behind.
“I think our girls do a good job of not focusing on [the lack of competing divers],” said Schroeder. “ … But if we lose by 13 or under, we kind of know that, ‘Okay, we’re as good a team as they are.’”
It takes a team 94 points or more out of a total of 186 to win a high school meet.
The divers are doing a great job and improve each day, but they are going from never having done this before to trying to compete with kids that have been diving since they were six years old, Schroeder said.
“[In practice] we might swim with shoes on, or we might swim with t-shirts on just to kind of be a little bit goofy,” Schroeder said.
According to Samson, high school swimming is not about getting the end results that you want.
“It’s those memories that you’ll make, like laughing in the pool, swimming with shoes and shirts on,” Samson said.