Courtney Chang
Staff Reporter
Terror Pride Gets its Feet Wet
It is the sport that values both teamwork and individual successes, encompasses all forms of physical and mental strain, and both guys and girls practice together. The McDaniel Swimming team is a sport that is often shoved under the carpet of football, soccer, and lacrosse, but it is one of the most grueling and tedious of any college offered sport. With practices including intense weight lifting, running, flexibility stretches, and not to mention miles upon miles of endurance swimming, the Green Terror Swim team shows an incredible amount of moxie.
Despite the three to four hour long practices, five days a week, the spirit of this team seems incredibly positive and inspiringly strong. Sophomore swimmer Danielle Smith comments on how “The friendships and bonds that all of us make are by far my favorite part about being on the team. We are like a family because all of us are always together. We eat together, practice together, hang out together, ride the buses together, cheer for each other, and we have so many inside jokes.”
Smith points out how “This is the only sport that practices co-ed, and the guys and girls might as well compete as one team. Everyone cheers for each other because we just want everyone to give it their best!” Senior Kacy Cribbs adds, “My favorite part of swimming is hands down the team. During the season all of us get really close to each other, and we become like a second family and support team to each other, which is wonderful to having college. We help each other through the season.”
Perhaps that is the key to what makes this sport so unique to all others, the closeness of the team, how both the individual and the team are pushed to their limits, but with everyone on the team wishing the success of everyone else, not only themselves.
In swimming, people are not discriminated against or shunned because of their sex or skill level, everyone seems content to just cheer and give it their all. Freshman Caitlin Pozmanter offers insight into this unique bond that the McDaniel Swim team has formed. “What is so nice about this team, and in general the sport itself, is all of us get along really well. It is just the overall drive of the team to do well, but not leaving anyone behind. Everyone gets cheered for, no matter what your team rank is, as long as you’re pushing yourself and doing your best that is all that matters in the end.”
Head Above Water
Unfortunately, swimmers have not always been treated with the same respect that is often bestowed onto other athletes. “People have said to me that this isn’t a real sport, and I ask them if their narrow definition of a sport is dripping with sweat and covered in grass stains, because swimming is a sport, and an intense one at that! It works all of your parts, and it requires endurance, strength, cardio, breathing, and muscles?swimming is a beast of sports, especially when you’re competing at a college level,” freshman Jason Harder venomously exclaims. “I really feel like I’m pushing myself a lot harder and my endurance and times have gotten a lot faster since being on college swim.”
Like all true sports, swimming has countless perils associated with it. There are numerous hazards in swimming like slipping on a wet surface and breaking something on the hard, tile pool floors, turning wrong at the end of a lane can result in leg and foot injuries, and diving into too shallow water can result in neck and upper torso injuries. “The most common injury associated with this sport is defiantly injury to the shoulders. There are about 17 people on the team currently who are swimming injured or recovering from a shoulder injury alone. People usually overextend or tear something.
The worst injury I’ve seen in swimming happened last year. A girl fell off the starter’s block and broke her wrist!” sophomore Morgan DeHart shudders. But despite the grueling practices, draining heats, and countless injuries, McDaniel’s Swim team still manages to keep a smile while always laughing out loud.
Some of the most memorable memories include the times when sophomore Brandon Campbell beat fellow swim member and freshman Erik Brennan at the 50 free. “It was my finest moment!” Campbell grins as Brennan rolls his eyes and laughs. Junior Chris Bosco recants another favorite swim memory that happened last season. “My teammates and I decided to play a joke on the women’s team, so we put an inappropriate object in the pool, and when all of the girls came out of the locker room and walked over to the pool to dive into it, they saw it and all of them began cracking up. All of us got a great laugh out of the joke,” Bosco loudly chuckles.
Upcoming Spring Season is Looking Bright
Head coach Kim Easterday and assistant coach Jeff Heistand have ambitious plans for this upcoming season, with their number one goal for the upcoming season being to move up in the team ranks at the Champion Conference at Franklin and Marshall, from February 20 till the 22.
Coach Heistand states, “I tell the swimmers to give it nothing less than your very best, it is all Kim [Coach Easterday] and I really want, besides everyone having fun while doing it.”
The coaches are aiming for improvement from top to bottom. “We want each individual to improve and this in turn will improve the team. Swimming has personal goals and team goals, and as coaches we try to get the swimmers to focus on how to obtain these goals. But in the end it is not so important as to if a swimmer obtains his or her goals, but it is how the person went about obtaining their goals. Swimming in a meet is like taking a test. If you do poorly in the meet, or get a bad grade on the test, you need to look at what you could improve on so you will succeed next time,” Coach Easterday states.
When asked if she wanted to give a little shout out to the team, Coach Easterday pauses to think, then philosophically phrases, “Have confidence in yourself, as cheesy as that sounds, it is the core essential to doing well. You need to believe in your training and keep your mind in the present. Take each race by itself, and once it is over move on, you did your best and it is now in the past.”
Both coaches work extremely well together and this is one of the reasons why the McDaniel Swim team is so close and driven in everything they do. “We work very well together because we balance each other. Both of us care about the individual swimmer as a whole, and not just as a swimmer. We are quite the combination!” both coaches laugh.
“Swimming mirrors life. You can be given the best training, all of the top equipment, and the toughest coaches, but the only way you will become a great swimmer is if you use what you are given and you push yourself, if you have the willpower, determination, and dedication to do well, then you will. These principles are what we try to instill into our swimmers, but in the end it is all up to them to take what we give them and use it to the best of their abilities,” Coach Easterday comments.
Sophomore Megan Giroux grins at the potential this year’s team holds. “The team defiantly has a lot more depth, I think that once we really start the grind for our Championship Meet we are really going to surprise ourselves,” Giroux mentions. “The overall attitude of the team is pretty positive, and even though all of us are really tired right now I think all of us are really looking forward to see how we measure up to other teams come spring.”
Swimming is a sport that stands out from a lot of other sports. Apart from the unique physical demands that it requires, there are so many life lessons that a swimmer can take out of the pool with them: teamwork, time management, work ethics, interacting with different people, and the experience. Swimming can hurt a lot, both physically and mentally, and you have to sacrifice a lot of free time that could have otherwise been spent at parties, the library or with friends, but the rewards always outweigh the pain.
This sport is not only about a team working together to accomplish similar goals, but it is also about the personal satisfaction an individual gains from achieving their own personal goals. This sport is about dedication to the team and self-respect.