It takes a lot of courage to step up alone onto the starting blocks before a big race, but members of the Girl’s Swim and Dive team must do so at each meet. Summoning that courage is difficult, but the athletes seek to instill confidence in each other every day so that they can rise to the challenge when it comes time for them to step up.
The girls are off to a strong start this year – with a record of three wins and zero losses, they’re setting themselves up for a fantastic season.
Part of the team’s confidence comes from their personnel, but unfortunately the team lost one of their best swimmers, Xime Avila, after she graduated last year and went on to swim at the University of Alabama. Senior Finley Brunner, co-captain of the swim team, believes that though the team has big shoes to fill, they’re stepping up to the challenge.
“We had a lot of new girls join who are very good swimmers,” Brunner said. “While we may have lost Xime, we [are] making up for it.”
One of these new girls is freshman Vika Anderson, a seasoned athlete who has been swimming since she was six years old. Although she’s swam for club teams most of her life, she decided to join the high school’s team after seeing how much her older brother enjoyed it.
She believes her biggest contribution to the team this year is her experience, specifically in breaststroke.
“Getting another breaststroker in there [is important] because not a lot of people are breaststrokers,” Anderson said. “[Breaststroke] events can be difficult to compete in if you haven’t been trained in them.”
As someone who has been swimming for nearly a decade, Anderson certainly brought a lot of experience to the team. Although she considers her prior training to be part of the team’s success so far this year, she believes that the relationships between teammates is what best sets them apart.
“You have to have a lot of compassion for people,” Anderson said. “There’s nothing worse than getting disqualified or adding a whole bunch of time when you thought you worked really hard. You [think you] failed, but you didn’t fail. You just didn’t do [the] best. And I think the regrouping and positivity from [our team] is so helpful.”
The supportive community of the swim team is what made many members join.
Junior Regina Avila, younger sister to Xime Avila, started swimming partially because her older sister swam, but her reasons ran deeper than that.
“You get to spend a lot of time with your teammates. It’s good for your body, but you also get to make a lot of good friendships,” Avila said. “I think that’s what makes it really fun— I just get to talk to people from our team.”
A common misconception is that swimmers are not really part of a team since the majority of events are swam individually. However, the swimmers know that they’re just as much a team as any other sport, and the relationships between teammates is what has pushed them to success.
“People think that there’s no true friendship. People [think we] go off into our own world and that’s just not the case,” Anderson said. “We act as sisters. We stand by that and make sure that we’re all okay. We have each other’s support. Giving people the confidence that they need is a requirement to be successful.”
