(Middle-lane swimmers) definitely are not going to be enough this year, not against Cherry Hill East or West. |
A lot of the teams have gotten stronger. Our diving has been a little down and that has hurt us in a few meets, but we're working to improve that. At least four teams (that are on Vineland's schedule) have really improved. Washington Township has 14 new kids, Cherry Hill West and Cherry Hill East are strong, and Eastern is always a competitive team. They all have good coaches who know how to plan lineups, so it's going to be a challenge. |
I thought the key was everybody pulling together and swimming their hearts out. |
I'm not leaving coaching. The grind of high school coaching is enormous. Coaching state championship teams is not all that it's cracked up to be sometimes. I never really got used to making decisions that not everybody was going to be happy with. |
It went really well. Each of our swimmers averaged 13,000 meters a practice and we had near-perfect attendance. |
We did a lot of race-pace swimming. It was far more intense than in the past. |
We expect to swim a lot faster. We're going to have to swim a lot faster. |
We have some real deep holes this year, that's for sure. East had a great recruiting year; Cherry Hill West got stronger; Washington Township is stronger. We don't have the depth we have had (during the state championship runs). The challenge is to have everybody step up and do the best that they can do. |
We lost something like 44 points from last year. We replaced it with like five points from incoming freshman. That means the returning swimmers really turned it up. But it doesn't make it any less disappointing. |