GHS Girls Swim Season Recap: What a Time to Be Alive
Hope Yu
What a time to be alive right? Myself, and I think the rest of the team, would agree. This season has been truly a strange experience for us all.
We, the Garfield High School Bullfrogs are known for our spirit and commitment. From self-fundraising campaigns all around Seattle (no matter the weather) and consistent in and out of season get-together during lunches and after meets, we truly have a love for each other and the sport that goes much deeper than accomplishments or awards. However, for many of us, these couple months are a chance to represent our school at the highest level of performance possible. We came into this year with a season of pure accomplishments behind us. Last November, we were the highest placed public school at state thanks to our many finalists. Before COVID hit, plans were already in the mix to begin overtaking those last few private schools. Of course, everything had to change.
Like almost everyone else in the world (excluding my incredibly pessimistic father), we were all hoping and praying that this pandemic would be controlled by the summer. Of course, this did not happen. In fact, our season, and many other sports as well, was pushed back months on end. Being the optimistic people we are, many of us hoped that this would lead to a chance to hold events such as Districts and State; but again, our hopes were crushed. Instead, we have been holding our usual 5:45 am practices at Medgar Evers - socially distanced of course - and online zoom workouts 3 times a week. We aren’t allowed to hold our weekly Friday meets, nor are we able to race even half the amount of teams that we used to. Instead, there are bi-weekly time trials and 2 virtual meets, that we lost, with Roosevelt and Lakeside.
I’m not sure how this applies to other sports, but competitive swimming is unique in the sense that it is incredibly difficult to go a best time during practice. For many of us, we can go entire seasons without cutting off more than 0.4 seconds at a meet. Depending on the race, losing just one second over a year is considered a success. We train hours on end and put on crazy expensive, high tech suits, just for the chance to shave off those couple seconds. However ridiculous it may seem, it’s how the sport seems to work. Now that we have no nice pools to swim in (King County Aquatics Center seems like a fever dream) and showing up at 5:45 am to spend half an hour putting on a tech suit seems like a waste of time and energy, we find ourselves attempting to race this imaginary other team in the early hours of the day. Mind you, this is only half our team as the others are given a chance to do only online workouts due to safety precautions. Thus, our races haven’t been as successful as we would have liked. However, the chance to have a season is more than a dream come true for many of us.
Simply put, just seeing each other is enough for us to go on and try our best. Many of us treasure that daily 1 hour and 30 minutes that we can leave our houses and interact almost as if nothing has changed. From blasting music in our cars, and sometimes at each other from across the parking lot, to our annual senior night filled with tears and old stories, we are ultimately incredibly grateful and pleased with how this season has turned out.
We, the Garfield High School Bullfrogs are known for our spirit and commitment. From self-fundraising campaigns all around Seattle (no matter the weather) and consistent in and out of season get-together during lunches and after meets, we truly have a love for each other and the sport that goes much deeper than accomplishments or awards. However, for many of us, these couple months are a chance to represent our school at the highest level of performance possible. We came into this year with a season of pure accomplishments behind us. Last November, we were the highest placed public school at state thanks to our many finalists. Before COVID hit, plans were already in the mix to begin overtaking those last few private schools. Of course, everything had to change.
Like almost everyone else in the world (excluding my incredibly pessimistic father), we were all hoping and praying that this pandemic would be controlled by the summer. Of course, this did not happen. In fact, our season, and many other sports as well, was pushed back months on end. Being the optimistic people we are, many of us hoped that this would lead to a chance to hold events such as Districts and State; but again, our hopes were crushed. Instead, we have been holding our usual 5:45 am practices at Medgar Evers - socially distanced of course - and online zoom workouts 3 times a week. We aren’t allowed to hold our weekly Friday meets, nor are we able to race even half the amount of teams that we used to. Instead, there are bi-weekly time trials and 2 virtual meets, that we lost, with Roosevelt and Lakeside.
I’m not sure how this applies to other sports, but competitive swimming is unique in the sense that it is incredibly difficult to go a best time during practice. For many of us, we can go entire seasons without cutting off more than 0.4 seconds at a meet. Depending on the race, losing just one second over a year is considered a success. We train hours on end and put on crazy expensive, high tech suits, just for the chance to shave off those couple seconds. However ridiculous it may seem, it’s how the sport seems to work. Now that we have no nice pools to swim in (King County Aquatics Center seems like a fever dream) and showing up at 5:45 am to spend half an hour putting on a tech suit seems like a waste of time and energy, we find ourselves attempting to race this imaginary other team in the early hours of the day. Mind you, this is only half our team as the others are given a chance to do only online workouts due to safety precautions. Thus, our races haven’t been as successful as we would have liked. However, the chance to have a season is more than a dream come true for many of us.
Simply put, just seeing each other is enough for us to go on and try our best. Many of us treasure that daily 1 hour and 30 minutes that we can leave our houses and interact almost as if nothing has changed. From blasting music in our cars, and sometimes at each other from across the parking lot, to our annual senior night filled with tears and old stories, we are ultimately incredibly grateful and pleased with how this season has turned out.