Swimming question

GrandGreen · February 22, 2005

See that NT placed fifth in the Belt in swimming. With highlights being a second and fourth place finish. It just seems like the team has not substantially progressed and I am wondering why. I know that they are on their 3rd or 4th coach in their brief history. Is NT slow progress, at least in my mind, due to low budget relative to other Belt teams or just a lack of emphasis. Does anyone know the number of ships that can be offered and the number at NT?

Edited February 22, 2005 by GrandGreen

pawgal02 · February 23, 2005

I don't know the answer to some of your questions, but I have to say that the swim team has improved so much this season compared to the rest. Records were broken left and right and those girls did a great job this season. If you pick up The Daily, you'll see how much they talk about their improvement this year.

On reason that they are slowly progressing is because of the coaching changes. The head coach has now been there for 3 seasons, but they had a great assistant coach, who did alot for the team last year who is now at U of Denver.

I hope this helps!

GrandGreen · February 23, 2005

I don't know the answer to some of your questions, but I have to say that the swim team has improved so much this season compared to the rest. Records were broken left and right and those girls did a great job this season. If you pick up The Daily, you'll see how much they talk about their improvement this year.
On reason that they are slowly progressing is because of the coaching changes. The head coach has now been there for 3 seasons, but they had a great assistant coach, who did alot for the team last year who is now at U of Denver.
I hope this helps!

Thanks for your input. My post was not to be critical of the athletics, who must be really dedicated. The team is improving but breaking team records does not have a lot of weight when the team had only one swimmer in one event good enough to place in the top 3 in the conference meet.

Sometimes results in the non-revenue sports are misleading because of resource levels. For example, a few have talked about how bad NT's last baseball team was. I actually think that team was amazing in some ways. The team had less than 2 ships and was coached by a retiree who limited his salary to the amount that was allowed and still draw full social security. They did win a few games and once beat the number one team in the nation. Great results in my mind versus the resources allocated.

Hence, the question on resources. Good luck to our swimmers and I hope they continue to improve and actually challenge in the Belt in the near future.

jjpfootball · February 26, 2005

Swimming is a sport that you must be 2 or 3 deep in each event to score well in this type of meet.

The relays are wourth 40 points for first place and if you don't have the swimmers to win one or two of these relays or at least be in the top two you will not finish in the top three at these meets.

A swimmer can swim in two relays and 3 ind. events or 3 relays and 2 ind. events so unless you have say 10 good swimmers you lose. Plus these 10 must be divided up between the four stroks so building a strong team for champ. meets takes time Mona will do the job but it will take 5 years to build a program and alot of work for the swimmers.

As a side note these kids started working out for this season in Aug and finished up what last week? This is a long time and alot of kids do not want to spend this amount of time in the sport.