An expansive blue canvas, wrinkled with light, remains still as it waits to be painted. Seven pairs of brushes dive into its surface, with each stroke painting a new ripple.
White Station High School’s (WSHS) swim team is composed of members who are completely new to the sport, and others who have been swimming for upwards of five years. Through the team, students turn a new hobby or lasting passion into a way to represent their school.
“[Swimming] was really like the only thing I was doing, because I started in seventh grade at a club outside of school, and it kind of really got me into it,” Oliver Edwards (9) said. “But slowly it’s just pretty much made up most of my week. And so it’s like, it’s pretty much the main thing I do.”
Since WSHS does not have its own pool, Spartan swimmers participate in a club team, as per the White Station Swimming website. For example, both Edwards and Olivia Smith-Olsen (9) are part of Memphis Tiger Swimming. Edwards practices for an hour and a half to two hours for six days each week with his club team.
“On a normal day, it’ll probably be like everything is broken up into sets,” Edwards said. “You start with the warm-up set. And so you’re going to do a certain amount of distance and a drill, but — cause everything’s split up into times and stuff — so you like, you’re doing everything on a certain time and that’s like to keep you on pace. So you’re not just swimming endlessly. There’s actually stuff to work to, and it’s usually like the practices get progressively harder throughout the practice.”
High school swim meets are split into 11 events, which are organized by stroke and distance. They are then separated into a boys category and a girls category for a total of 22 events. Each event is then divided into heats: small groups of swimmers of similar speeds racing concurrently. High school competition pools are short-course pools, which, in the U.S., are 25 yards in length. Other countries often measure a short-course pool in meters. The usual distances for events are 50, 100, 200 and 400 yards.
“[A meet] is chaotic in an organized way,” Edwards said. “It’s very similar to a track meet, but there’s a lot more variety because there’s a lot more different kinds of races. So everything is broken up into events and heats … And then it just, each event plays out and you go to your own heats on your own time. So you’re always right around the pool. It’s not like you’re going to a whole ‘nother facility.”
Most swimmers specialize in a particular stroke: the freestyle or front crawl, the backstroke, the breaststroke, or butterfly. However, in events like the individual medley, swimmers must perform all four strokes back-to-back.
“I tend to do breaststroke,” Smith-Olsen said. “That’s my primary and I’ve placed it … For the high school swim meets the distances are 50s and 100s. I tend to do both of those … Right now, my best time for the 50 is 40.30 seconds and then my best for the 100 is a minute [and] 26.55 [seconds].”
Since WSHS’s team does not practice together, most members do not see each other outside of meets unless they are on the same club team or share classes.
“Well, I do carpool with one of the members multiple times a week to our club team, so we talk on occasion,” Smith-Olsen said. “But, mostly during the meets, we might have relays, which are events where four people each swim a set distance of a set stroke and combine their times to be the final time for that event and we kind of just like give each other high fives, congratulate each other after events, after they swim — stuff like that.”
The coaches of WSHS’s swim team are Smith-Olsen’s parents. They started coaching at WSHS this year, but used to help coach the Maxine Smith STEAM Academy team. They have varying roles during and outside of meets.
“My dad’s the coach that kind of moves around and makes sure people get to their places,” Smith-Olsen said. “And my mom’s the one who sits at the tables by the judges and you can go talk to her after your events to see what you need to work on … My dad, he has to put in potential new best times or just times in general … And they also have to OK people’s choices on what they’re going to swim.”
Edwards and Smith-Olsen have been swimming for five and two years, respectively. Both plan to continue swimming through high school.
“I like doing strategy I have found in other sports,” Edwards said. “I can’t like work quickly with a team, and I like being able to focus on myself more while also being able to like cheer others on, because I can still think about exactly what I need to do and then have a team aspect of like, ‘Oh, those are my friends, I’m going to cheer them on.’”