Alex Baumann Meet Report

First off, congratulations to our swimmers and families for an excellent meet. Luckily the weather was good for driving (last year at this meet we had a massive snow storm). Below are meet reports from Coaches Aimee and Rick.

Meet Report from Coach Aimee

The Novice’s second meet of the season proved that our recent hyper focus on starts and turns paid huge dividends. There were many great swims and tons of personal bests.  Recently, we have discussed and practiced a focused, standard pre-race routine that starts with the warm up and includes visualization, positive self-talk and preparation behind the blocks.  The swimmers have embraced the pre-race routine and many implemented this for their swims.  We will continue to practice this and utilize the team Ipad to video starts and turns on Saturdays to provide instant feedback.

Given that this was our second meet of the season swimmers seemed to be more confident in their training and preparation and this was reflected in their swims.  The Novice group continues to be quite focused in practices by embracing the drills, technical details and fitness training.  Swimmers are pushing and supporting each other while at the same time enjoying the process.  I look forward to seeing how this focus will translate as we prepare for the Hello Winter Meet in a few weeks!

Finally, a special thank you to the parents who get their swimmers to the pool on time, fueled and for all your support of our wonderful team!

Meet Report from Coach Rick

Overall, a fantastic meet. Our starts and turns have improved tremendously, and our sprinting is well ahead of where I thought it would be. Our technique has also improved in many areas, and we’ll keep working with our video system to make it better and better.

The older swimmers also had to deal with something unusual for a Central Region meet: too little time between events. I believe the smallest rest between events was 5 minutes, and less than 20 minutes was pretty standard. While this isn’t always conducive to Personal Bests, we still raced the other swimmers. And racing is the fun part of our sport. Well done!

We still have a few areas to work on for our big Hello Winter meet on Dec. 13-15.

• Breakouts – we still breathe on our first stroke, and slowly get into swimming. Top swimmers explode into swimming after a breakout
• Pacing – in general we’re taking our 100s and 200s out too slowly. If you’re in your comfort zone, you’re not in your racing zone!
• Early Morning Warmups – swimming fast early in the morning is HARD, and it requires more warmup, not less. We had quite a few swimmers cut the warmup short, and then have trouble on their first race

We’ll be working on those things for the next few weeks.

Lastly, here are some of our top results

Tomi came through with a big meet:

• Team record in the 100 Back
• Gold in 50 Fly
• Silver in 50 Back
• 6th in 400 Free