Red Wing Athletic Association

  I would like to take the time to touch base on a few different subjects.

MORNING PRACTICE.  Morning practices are designed to give our older and upper level swimmers an opportunity to increase their practice time.  It is not designed to give them an option of which practice to go to.  The main practice is the afternoon practice.  Mornings should be looked at as an additional practice.

MEETS.  Several items to address here.  First of all, All RWSC swimmers are expected to participate in the swimming meets.  Especially the finals meets that they qualify for.  This is a team activity and we would like all swimmers to participate as full team members.  This does not mean that meets are mandatory, but it is expected that our swimmers will participate in meets.  For those of you aspiring to be college swimmers, it has been my experience that a college coach will look closer at what a swimmer has done in USS swimming than High School because of the similarity of events and formats.

   When we have a meet it is important to be prepared for them.  That means coming to practice regularly and not taking the day off before a meet to ":rest".  We look at the whole season in determing our workout schedule.  While we want our swimmers to swim well at all of our meets, not every meet has the same importance.  In order to keep up our training schedule we sometimes "swim through" meets.  This means that we stay on our workout schedule and don't do any resting for certain meets.  When swimmers "rest" for a meet by staying home, they are offsetting that workout schedule.

  It is also very important that trhe swimmers come to the meet prepared.  They need to be at the pool for warm ups at the times they are given and not show up late.  With the size that meets are getting to be, there are sometimes divided warm up sessions, it is critical to get there on time so that a complete and proper warm up can be had.  It is also critical that swimmers come "fueled" up for the meet.  They need to eat a good, healthy breakfast before the meet.  Skipping breakfast and sending the kids with a bunch of unhealthy snacks is not the way to go.  Nor is constantly eating during a meet.  As soon as food is ingested the digestive sysytem kicks in.  This takes blood, oxygen, and other nutirents from the rest of the body and focuses them on the stomach.  This is energy that swimmers need to preform well in their races.  Diverting this energy hurts the swimmers.  Only enough food should be brought to quell any major hunger attacks. It is much more important for a swimmer to stay hydrated during a meet.   It is also important for swimmers to stay ready during a meet.  This includes staying warm in between events.  I would like to see all swimmers with tops, bottoms, and something on their feet.  Doing a good warm up is nullified if a swimmer then sits in the pool with no clothes on.  It has been proven that warm muscles work better than cold muscles.  That is why you see the Olympic swimmers wearing parkas, caps, mittens, boots, and pants no matter how warm the tempurature is.

Practices.  Kepp in mind that the more you practice the better you will get.  We have specific recommendations as to the number of practices that each swimmer should attend each week.  Right now we are meeting those recommendations with less than 50% of our swimmers.  We are taking attendance this summer and at the end of the season those results will be published.  I think the results will surprise a lot of people. 

CAMPS.  This is a very personnal subject for me.  While camps can be fun and exciting, it has been my experince for over thirty years that swimmers to not come back from camp better than they were before camp.  Many of the camps run are by colleges.  They do not have the backgtround in working with young swimmers.  Nor do they have any ideas about what has been worked on in the past.  It takes the swimmers out of their workout schedule and in some cases ruins their season.  It has taken me over a year in some cases to correct what a swimmer has "learned" at camp.  Plus it also sends a message to the coaching staff that you don't beleive in what we are doing.

UPCOMING MEETS.   We ahve the Alexandria meet coming up next weekend and have quite a good crew going.  If you missed the sign ups for the lake swims you can still do that at the lake.  We have a great opportunity that I hope all of our swimmers will take advantage of.  We have been invited to the Bloomington Aquatic Club's Last Chance invitational.which is being held on the 16th and 17th of July.  This is an outdoor 50 meter pool and will give us some experience in this format heading into ABC finals and STATE.  The 12 and unders swim Satruday morning and the 13 and olders swim Sunday morning..

  Due to the small number of Age Group Swimmers, and in an attempt to even out the numbers in the water, we will be moving the Pre Senior practices to an earlier start time on most days.  Please see the updated schedule for all the details.

   Here we go, a new season is upon us.  It seems like yesterday we were getting ready for finals meets and now we have registration tonight and the start of a new season tomorrow.

       Our goal for this season is to continue to build on the success we had last season.  We will continue to work on getting to be better, smarter swimmers.  We will focus on how to learn how to swim right, to become students of swimming.  We have accomplished quite a bit in the past year.  We had many new C, B, A, Champ, and Zone times.  We have won numerous individual awards as well as three team trophies.  We are on a good path and need to continue on.

    I would like to thank everyone for responding to our survey.  We had a lot of good comments.  We try to keep the practice schedule as consistant as possible, although we are toward the bottom of the list for pool time.  We know it doesn't always fit everyone's schedule, but we do the best with the options we have.  One word about practices; swimming is a very demanding sport.  It is very repititous, and takes time and effort to get better at.  The more time a swimmer can put into practicing, the better they will get.

    We are looking forward to having a great spring/summer season with a lot of fun and a lot of great times.

Hello RWSC,

Ann Frost has been teaching and coaching swimming in Red Wing since 1980. Although she has worked with some of the older and fastest swimmers, she enjoys working with the younger swimmers, teaching them the basics of competitive swimming.