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Summer Swim League - General Information
The Summer League is always full of interesting developments (and one of the reasons I started this thread was to outline some of the stuff that goes on during the season, even if it doesn't directly involve my kids - so I figured I'd hit on this one for you). In this case the drama revolves around Maddie. Anyone who's been reading for a while is familiar with Maddie and her accomplishments. She is unquestionably the best 9/10 year old swimmer in the county and will ultimately win whatever 2 events she enters, but that's not the issue...the issue is that she has positioned herself in the GRPA Summer League to potentially set state records. Her best shot at this is the 25 free where her personal best is only .2 seconds from the current record.
To try and give Maddie her best shot at State Records her parents signed her up to swim 25 Free & 25 Back in the county meet (to qualify for state a swimmer must finish in the top 3 in county and a state record can only be broken at the state meet), and they had her exhibitioning 50 Free, which is a waste of time because the whole purpose of exhibition swims is to get an opportunity to be on a relay (so this was a mistake on the parents part).
Now, in order for you to understand the situation I have to take a minute to give you some background on the Summer team that Maddie swims with. The team is Grand Cascades...and they take this stuff WAY to seriously. To begin, they have won the county team championship something like 17 years in a row, and they don't just win, they typically score about 800 points more than 2nd place. They have well over 300 swimmers on the team. They have an 8 lane heated pool and they start Summer practices in mid April, where most teams start in mid May (assuming a mild Winter). They have touch pads in all the lanes and an electronic scoreboard (pretty flashy equipment for a summer team).
The organizer for this team is also the organizer for the league in Forsyth County...so all other county teams must submit their county swim plan to him ahead of time...and it has been reported (by people that used to work with him on setting lineups) that he uses this information to adjust his county entries to place swimmers in areas where he can improve his team's results (like he really needs to do that...without it he might only win county by 785 points).
Back to Maddie...because her parents put her in something for Exhibition that was useless the organizer changed her to 25 back and 50 free, and she's now scheduled to exhibition 25 Free (which is the most important one to the family). They requested he switch the 25 free to a regular event and exhibition 25 back, but his response was that he has another swimmer that he thinks will win the 25 free which means he'll get 2 first place results rather than a 1st and 2nd in free and less points in back...(again like he needs the additional 3 points, which is the difference between 1st and 2nd at county). The parents were going to impress upon him that it is important to them that Maddie swim 25 free at county so she'll have a shot to swim it at state and thus get a state record...but we'll have to wait until close to next weekend to find out if he listened or if his selfish desire to blow out the rest of county was more important to him...
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