New recruits bring energy to team

Recently, club swimming has been recruiting heavily to replenish its ranks. Roughly 40 students currently belong to the team, but only half consistently show up to practice. The freshman class has been particularly enthusiastic about swimming this year, and one of its members, Isaac Reyes ’11, is Seery’s co-captain. The freshmen have also been postering campus and heightening the publicity of the team to match that of other club sports teams.

Like many club teams, swimming does not have a coach and depends entirely on its captains to organize practices. Seery and Reyes divide up the responsibility of devising workouts that range from 1,500 to 3,000 meters per day. Instead of practicing twice a week for two hours as it had been, the team now practices five days a week during one-hour slots. The new practice schedule has improved the fitness and closeness of the team.

“Swimming is a sport that really requires you to train as much as you can because it requires movement your muscles aren’t used to on a regular basis,” Seery said. “It’s really hard to get in swimming shape if you’re not swimming every day, so we changed practice to five times a week. We also decided that if we had more practices … people would bond more as a team and would look forward to practice.”

More consistent practice has already paid off. In its most recent meet, the club swim team took second place in a three-school meet against the University of Connecticut and Temple. The team also won its two previous home meets in convincing fashion.

Despite the team’s success to date, it has encountered some problems. The most imposing obstacle is the team’s lack of funding. Because the swimmers must pay for their own lifeguards — which can cost more than $150 per week — the expenses for nine months of practice really add up. Once costs of travel to away meets and the organization of home meets are factored in, the club swim team’s bill is quite a heavy one to foot. It is also difficult to practice at Dillon pool — a facility that Seery jokingly claimed was older than the butterfly stroke.

The team has also struggled to find a good practice time that fits within both the swimmers’ schedules and the available times offered by Dillon Gym’s aquatics department. Though practices on Fridays from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. and Sundays from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. are ideal training times, the 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. slot on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays is slightly more inconvenient.

The team understands that it must take a back seat to set-in-stone recreational swimming slots as well as to varsity swimming, varsity water polo and high school club teams from the Princeton area. Being low team the totem pole, however, is still frustrating at times.

Despite these challenges, the team has seen a remarkable increase in its membership.

Seery attributes the team’s tremendous growth since her freshman year to Mallory James ’08, who singlehandedly started the organization. Dedicating herself entirely to club swimming, James did not back down to the club sports administration or give up when her teammates felt discouraged about the team’s future.

Though not as involved as she has been in the past because she is working on her thesis, James deserves most of the credit for building the foundation of the team.

Though club swimming has faced challenges in its third year of existence, the increasing interest in the team is promising for its future. For Seery and her fellow swimmers, the best part of the experience is the camaraderie.

“It has been really great to meet a whole new group of people who I wouldn’t necessarily have met elsewhere on campus that are fun to hang out with and great people to swim with,” Seery said. “Anyone can go to the pool during [recreational] swim hours and swim laps, but having your teammates there to laugh with you and encourage you is really wonderful.”