Making Waves

Erin Young & Karena Young: Our swimmers of the meet are sisters from Gibraltar Area Schools, with Erin Young in eighth grade, and her older sister Karena, a freshmen at Gibraltar High School. Both swimmers swim similar events, with distance swimming as the background for all of their events. Erin has developed into an exceptional 500 free swimmer, and Karena has moved toward the 200 breaststroke and 200 IM events. Both have greatly increased their training regimen with five to six practices during the week, with two practices in the mornings at 5:45 am. The commitment is very impressive for any sport. Both have been State Meet qualifiers in the past several years.

Notes from Coach Mike McHugh: Our team had a great night at Sonny’s Pizza, where we were honored as the team of the week by WRLU and Nick Freimuth as the awesome radio show host. We had more than 100 parents and swimmers attending the Packers night with Myles White. It was a great time for our swimmers to talk about practice, meets, and what they enjoyed about our program.

Our team discussion for this week centered on mediocrity and acceptance by many teams and athletes as “good enough.” We talked about the effort that is needed to overcome this complacency and lassitude by athletes and students. We discussed whether it was worthy of great focus and desire to excel, and how our teammates could help overcome some of the obstacles that are in place to hinder success at a higher level than average. There seems to be a pervasive attitude to not try to excel at one sport, but rather be a jack-of-all-trades, mediocre type of athlete. We discussed the pros and cons of this acceptance of lower expectations by families and athletes, versus the huge commitment and dedication to one goal. It was certainly an interesting topic.

Swim Term: Individual Medley (IM) – A swimming event using all four of the competitive strokes on consecutive lengths of the race. The order must be: butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, freestyle. Equal distances must be swam of each stroke. Distances offered: 100 yards, 200 yards/meters, 400 yards/meter.

Upcoming Meets

Minnesota Grand Prix-USA qualifiers: Nov. 20-22

Oshkosh Champions Meet: Nov. 21-23

Green Bay Sprint Meet: Dec. 6

Visit ppulse.com to see the Stevens Point meet results.

For more information visit the DCY website, teamunify.com/Home.jsp?team=widcy.