Swim, dive to compete against Grapevine and Grapevine-Colleyville Oct. 27
photo by Sarosh Ismail
Freshman Avery Gallucci uses a kickboard during morning practices with the team. With the upcoming tri-meet, the swim team has had practice every morning from 6-8:40 a.m. “We’ve got to train all week, we’ve got to train through our meets, and then when it’s time to go fast, we rest down,” swim coach Donzie Lilly said. “So our swimmers work all six months to go fast at one meet.”
The swim and dive team will compete in a tri-meet at the Grapevine Colleyville ISD pool on Oct. 27 at 6:00 p.m.
The swim and dive team beat Rick Reedy High School 316-235 wins on Oct. 15 and placed second on Sept. 22, beating Lewisville and losing to Marcus. Because of COVID-19, the team does dryland workouts outdoors instead of indoors, and they can only have two to three people in each lane in the pool. The team has not experienced a COVID-19 outbreak, but had people out due to contact-tracing.
“We’ve got a good system down to handle if someone’s out — it’s not two weeks behind, it’s just two weeks of something different,” swim coach Donzie Lilly said. “One of my friends [offers] personal training workouts [for the kids who are out] and gives them personal workouts and that way they can do that workout with their teammates and have a little bit of that interaction live.”
Despite these regulations, nothing has changed about racing itself according to junior Tyler Davis. Davis usually competes in the 100 breaststroke, the 200 free relay and the 400 free relay. Davis placed first in breaststroke at the Oct. 15 meet against Reedy.
“I’ve been working on my breaststroke technique and later I’m going to start working on power and speed,” Davis said. “This meet, I want to drop [time] in the 100 breaststroke [by] about a second and a half.”
Junior Emily Perry competes in the 200 freestyle relay and 400 freestyle relay. This will be her first meet back after missing the Reedy meet due to isolation for contact-tracing.
“I’m hoping to stay where I’m at or drop a couple [of] milliseconds,” Perry said. “We don’t rest for these meets; these are just practices for districts and regionals, so we don’t rest which is kind of hard.”
Meets this season require spectators to wear masks at all times and only allow 50% capacity in the bleachers.
“Since we are only doing dual and tri-meets [with] smaller teams, and swimming isn’t a super popular sport, we usually have plenty of room for everyone to watch,” Lilly said. “We’re just following the UIL [and] TEA guidelines on how we set up our spectators, but we haven’t had any problems at our first meet and we have plenty of room for people to come.”
Lilly said he has seen a lot of outstanding swims and promise from the team so far.
“A lot of people can be good at swimming,” Lilly said. “But the most important thing that our team needs to work on is starts, turns and finishes—everything outside the flags. So we’ve been working on our underwaters and our turns recently. If we work on those things, I think everyone is going to have a successful season.”
Senior Katherine Parker is the managing editor and this is her second year on staff. She loves journaling and spending time outdoors. In her free time,...
