Due to the Burlingame Aquatic Center temporarily shutting down to make renovations, the Dons are currently sharing the Aragon pool with the Panthers. All practices for the Aragon swim team are from 3:30-5:30 p.m., and Burlingame has the pool from 5:30-7:30 p.m.
The swim team has made quite a few readjustments in an effort to accommodate the new circumstances.
This season, the junior varsity and varsity teams have practices at the same time; practices are led by head coaches Bill Barthold and Nobu Kotani. Since they are practicing as one team, the team is split into a red group and a black group during practices. Rather than splitting the pool exclusively into JV and varsity swimmers, the swimmers are split up by their skills and abilities.
“In practice we split by black and red group, not JV and varsity, and then [in] meets we split by JV and varsity,” said senior team captain Jason Wang. “The black group practices in the larger pool and does harder workouts, and then the people in the red group in the smaller pool focus on drills and technique.”
In the big pool the black group practices in, there are additional divisions.
“Each lane [of the big pool] is a different speed. The first three lanes are the fastest, and then there’s the middle and the end,” Wang said.
Though the black group consists of more experienced swimmers, there is a mix of JV and varsity swimmers in the black group.
“The big pool is all returning swimmers and kids that mostly know the technique, and it’s just building up endurance and speed,” said senior Maria Sell.
In addition, the team is bigger than last year, so each lane has more swimmers.
“[In the big pool, there are] four or five people per lane, which is manageable … It’s definitely [more than] last year [which] was like three people per lane,” Wang said.
At practice, the swimmers try to match their skill with their surrounding teammates in their lane. One may be moved up or down depending on their speed.
“Each lane is a variety of people that are about your speed,” said junior Kristina Bruce. “People that are maybe on the faster side are usually [swimming] with the faster people.”
Because of the variety of abilities, the coaches have established different intervals for the lanes to swim in. The division of intervals allows the faster lanes to complete a set in a shorter amount of time.
“Last year in the big pool, we had two groups on different intervals. Today, we’re going to have three,” Barthold said.
Though lanes of different speed have different intervals, the swimmers in the big pool are still pushed to swim under relatively similar times.
“[The intervals are] relatively the same — like five to ten seconds apart from each other,” Sell said.
In their first meet of the season on March 1, the Dons lost against Mills.
“I think the oddest part was our surprise at how good Mills was, especially since they have just been moved up from the lower division,” said sophomore Mia Birkelund.
