The kids had their second swim meet on Saturday, this time against a very strong club. They had very very fast 11-12 year old boys, as well as a lot of fast older kids so unfortunately the Hurricanes fell. But both Ben and Kate nevertheless had a fun meet, and both improved on their times. The highlight for Ben — being part of the 15-18 medley relay team. He sure looked small compared to everyone else swimming!
This year, for the first time, I finally managed to persuade the kids to join swim team. Actually, it wasn’t me, even though I’ve been bugging them for a couple of years now. Kate has a friend at the club who swims competitively and who is on the summer swim team. She convinced Kate to join.
Then one day, while hanging out at the pool waiting for Kate to finish practice, Ben saw a friend of his from school. This friend introduced Ben to the swim coach, who asked him to join. Ben said yes, primarily because he has two very good friends from school on the team.
They had their first match this last Saturday (they missed the first one because of soccer) and both did very well. There are tons of kids in Kate’s age group so she swam as an “unofficial” swimmer, although her times are recorded.
Ben, who put up the most resistance to my proposals to join, took second in backstroke and first in the butterfly! His mixed-age relay team also took first. And he would have taken second in the free except that he’s not good at turns yet and missed the wall so was disqualified (DQ). He also DQed in the breaststroke for a stroke violation. And his age-based relay squad was DQed for early entry, or they would have taken first there too. He’s been working on his turns and stoke mechanics all week at practice though, so hopefully those errors are easy ones to correct. And now the boy who didn’t want to join swim team declined a visit to his uncle over the weekend until swim team is over because he doesn’t want to miss any more meets.
Now that I can blog again, I thought I’d catch up on a few things. First there was Kate’s All-Star tournament over Father’s Day weekend. She had a blast, scoring three goals over the four games and playing great defense at sweeper.
This weekend marked the end of Ted’s soccer coaching career, as Kate moves on to play travel soccer next year. She’ll be joining the club where Ben plays soccer, so we’ll have to be careful not to mix up uniforms or backpacks. Luckily I don’t think they’ll have the same number!