With school starting and everything getting going, sometimes people forget the lesser-known sports, one in mind is the swim team. Here is what you need to know for this upcoming season.
The boys' and girls' teams posed by the pool at sunset.
Competition swimming is completely different from swimming at your local pool. It’s a very rigorous sport that demands a lot of time and effort. When you’re a competitive swimmer you spend hours in the pool trying to become the best of the best. It takes years of dedication to become amazing.
One thing that make swimming difficult for audiences to understand is how scoring works for swim. It can be difficult to understand because swimming is a team sport but also an individual sport so how can the team win?
In each meet there are events, in most cases, 3 swimmers on each team will be entered into each event. The first, second and third place of that event will receive points. At the end of the meeting the points are added up and whichever school has the most points win.
For anyone interested in joining the swim team but is nervous about their abilities, don’t worry, the only thing you need to know how to do to join the team is know how to not drown in the water. You can contact Coach Jeanne Jendrzejewski for more information about joining swim.
The swim team practices together but is split into two groups, the boys' and girls' team. Each team has a coach. Katie Kaye coaches the boys and Coach J coaches the girls.
The boys' and girls’ team each have 2 captains. The boys' captains are Carlos Mize, a Senior, and Gavin Brown, a Senior. The girls' captains are Kayla Detter, a Senior, and Haylay Luznar, a Junior. In total on the team, we have about 44 swimmers. Luznar describes being a captain as a “...unique opportunity to be role models to other swimmers on the team and we get to help each swimmer have the best season they could possibly have.”
Freshman swimmer, Mia Portillo describes the team as a “welcome and uplifting place.”
The DeLand swimmers are up at 6:00 am every morning to practice and are in the pool until 7:45. They are in one meet every week, but for bigger meets against our district, there are weekend meets.
Currently we have competed in two meets, our first was against University High School, our second one was against Spruce Creek. The boys team won both meets, and the girls only lost against Spruce Creek, however, DeLand won the overall meet for both. As of right now our highest scoring team is the boys.
We currently are the 2021 and 2022 Record Breaker Champs, as well as 2021 boys 5 Star conference Champs and 2022 boys’ and girls’ 5 Star conference Champs.
We are the number 1 team in Volusia County and placed third in the district and fifth in the region last season.
The next upcoming meets are on September 19 against Mainland Highschool at the Deland YMCA, and September 27 against New Symrna Beach Highschool also at the Deland YMCA.
Photo by @deland_hs_swim
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