This year Park’s swim team is faced with inadequate facilities similar to previous years. The pool is short a lane. Most pools have six to eight lanes, and the park pool only has five. Despite the pool being old and missing a lane, the team is making the best out of it. Park is still able to have meets at the high school pool, the meets just look and act a bit different.
According to assistant coach Nate Stone, having a small team like the Park Girls swim team means the pool problems might actually aid them.
“Five lanes would benefit a small team like ours because we score less people,” Stone said. “But in years where the team is bigger, or during the guy’s season, it’s the opposite.”
According to junior swimmer Emily Foster, the pool itself is old and outdated. Foster said five lane pools are just outdated in general.
“The pool does have an increased risk of breaking because it’s outdated, and it’s just harder to have an old pool because parts are older and harder to replace,” Foster said.
Sophomore swimmer Isabel Schmidt said the problems with the pool don’t impact the Park Girls swim team all that much, the team has instead used the shortage of lanes as an opportunity to grow closer.
“I think our community grows very strong having five lanes because we are all very close together,” Schmidt said. “When we practice at the Rec Center instead of the high school pool I feel like we’re apart compared to how close we usually get.”
Foster said having an old pool might not affect the team all that much during practice, but in the long run it might.
“For the most part, most of the equipment has been replaced, hopefully it will stay intact. It takes a while to get the parts replaced,” Foster said.
As the Park girl’s swim team progresses through the season, the team is missing out on what practices could look like with a newer pool. Schmidt said having more space in the pool would help practice a lot.
“Since the pool is a lot more cramped with five lanes, if we had six lanes we would get a lot more out of practice,” Schmidt said.
For the girls swim team, it seems as if the season is hardly affected, but according to Stone the girls having less numbers means the boys have a harder time with a five lane pool, competitively and in practice.
“The boys swim team is much larger,” said Stone. “They are at a major disadvantage because of this.”
