Part 1 of 3:

Dual Meet Understandings

Get out your decoder rings. Statements from Coach Mark on left and right side has the survey content with grey background -- if on desktop. Reactions welcome in comments.

Part 2 of 3:

Time cards -- no way!

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Part 3 of 3:

Fail dives and those exits, especially on 3-meter boards.

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Click the button above to get the slide deck in a PDF. Or, look at the slide deck in the presentation below. 

Feedback welcome. This is the first draft. 

The Sectional Swim Schedule from the WPIAL has 77 teams, but only two are put into a forced marriage. 

We both want a divorce. And, the neighbors will be happy too.

For the last four years, Serra Catholic and The Ellis School have been in a forced marriage within the charts of the scheduling of the section meets from the WPIAL. It is time for a divorce. Turn back the clock to five years ago when both The Ellis School had its own schedule. (See the photos below.)

Serra Catholic has a robust squad in 2020

Once upon a time, Serra had a tiny team. Not any longer. There are plenty of swimmers at Serra. Don't punish Serra with a bad WPIAL schedule by sending the team miles away for home swim meets. Don't cutting short Serra's opportunities to compete in regular sectional meets. Times change. Serra's coaches can speak for themselves, but would be great to have someone from the WPIAL communicate with them.

Hopefully, Serra Catholic can swim against Serra in section swim meets in the future, without a third team being present.

Girls Only Meets can Work

Holding a lone meet, once a season, with only a girls squad is not so bad for the competition. These meets with The Ellis School open up other opportunities for the squads. 

In the 2020 season, Springdale came to a non-section meet with Ellis and it had boys. The boys got to compete. There wasn't a meet outcome for the boys, but they got in and results were recorded.

In the 2020 season, the Ellis girls swam against Shady Side Academy while the boys races had Shady Side Academy against Kiski Prep (Kiski School), an all-boys squad. Teams that really want to have boys competition along with the Ellis girls could invite Kiski Prep into the meet. 

There are a bunch of INDEPENDENT swimmers that can come to compete in both swim races and diving with our meets in both the boys and girls events. But, then when the forced schedule marriage happening, there becomes four or more teams. So, it is nice to have the open lanes for absorbing the indie participants along with the Ellis competition.

Lastly, we like to do some quicker meets now and then so that we can do some shared warm-down time with the other team. We like to take out the lane-lines and play SKWIM, after the meet. We've done this in the past with Northgate and with Springdale in 2020. Fun. Plum, North Hills, Chartiers Valley, PEAQ, Central Catholic, Oakland Catholic, Moon and some other high-school teams have been able to play SKWIM in recent months. It would be great to be able to play a short SKWIM game following the meets with Ellis teams, especially when the meets are shorter and have a focus upon just the girls events. 

Don't pull the girls of The Ellis School out of one Schedule Marriage with one team and stick us with a different team.

The problem isn't with Serra Catholic. The problem is with the WPIAL schedule and the forced marriage for all section meets. To swap out Serra Catholic with another team is not going to help participation across the swimming community. The way to build swimming is to give The Ellis School its own line in the schedule. 

Four other GIANT reasons why the marriage schedule should be suspended.

The Ellis School is only for girls, but a coop situation is expected, desired and has been in the works from the realm of the head coach of The Ellis School for many months.

A new swimming coop with The Ellis School and Winchester Thurston is desired. 

There are boys at WTHS. The boys team can be WTHS and the girls team can be The Ellis School. 

Would-a, could-a, should-a: Tthe 2020 Girls AA Meet Recap with a W-T & Ellis

Looking at the results and outcomes for the 2019-2020 season, Ellis scored 26 points and finishes in 24th place among the girls. Winchester Thurston gets 58 points and finishes in 14th place. Total earned points is 84 points, without any relays, good for 11th place. Aria E of W-T swam in events that were not her best as WTHS could only field one swimmer per event. With W-T in a coop, her events change and her point total increases by five, a conservative estimate, Add W-T and Ellis together and we'd enter relays. Expect a 200 medley and 400 free, both getting 6th place, an easy prediction, nets another 22 points per event. Then, this coop team gets a would-a score of 133 points.

26 + 58 + 5 + 22 + 22 = 133 points = 7th place and 1 point ahead of Northgate,last years's WPIAL Championship Team.

A new swimming coop with Ellis and The City of Bridges High School is desired. 

The City of Bridges is a new school, opened in Pittsburgh, private, that is not yet in the WPIAL nor PIAA. We can get them there with this plan.

A new swimming coop with Ellis and the Hillel School is desired. 

The Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill has a private Jewish school with about 40 students, both boys and girls, that is just joining the WPIAL and PIAA in 2020. The Hillel School is coming to the WPIAL, as it fields a X-Country team. We would love to offer those students a chance to swim in the winter season as part of a coop team with The Ellis School. 

We can get Hillel on board with this plan.

Summary of the proposed Swim & Diving Coop with The Ellis School:

The Ellis School, a team that has sent swimmers to the PIAA meet in the past three years in a row (2020, 2019, 2018) wishes to form a coop with Winchester Thurston. The boys team can be called WTHS and the girls can be called Ellis. Plus, students, both boys and girls, from City of Bridges and Hillel School can also join the coop. 

These are small schools. They won't be so big as to get to the enrollment of class AAA in swimming. 

Long Term

Should the programs grow in participation, it might be the case that Winchester Thurston could field its own team in 2023. Who knows. Perhaps the W-T team could swim with PPS Sci-Tech.

NFHS rule-book clarification problems and guidance for local dual meets with three teams officials

This issue is to be addressed on its own web page. Click the button below.

Team Scores

To get to the Chatham University swim pool, home of the Cougars, a Division III mens and womens team, and also home to The Ellis School's Tigers, a WPIAL team that also swims its home meets with Serra Catholic, go to the Athletic Building on Campus in Shadyside in Pittsburgh, PA. 

The pool is below the gym.

What is that drill called?

Celia Zwierzynski Wolff posted on the Facebook group, Swim Coaches Idea Exchange, asking for a name of that drill. Her original question:

Freestyle with one leg bent at the knee, holding that foot out of the water while kicking like crazy with the other leg.

We do it.

The video below shows a swimmer at one of our practices with the Duquesne University's club team doing the drill, and doing it well. 

The various names of the drill were flowing in that thread.

Various names surfaced:

• Snark, Shark fin, Shark attack, Shark foot, Shark bait
• Thresher Shark
• Wounded knee
• Dry foot
• Peg leg
• 5 toes high
• Egyptian Crawl, Egyptian Free, Egyptian swim, The Egyptian, Egyptian Drill, Egyptian swim, Egyptian kick, 
• The kid with the sore toe
• Scorpion, or Scorpion swim
• Foot in the air freestyle, also, one foot in the air.
• Periscope up
• Sail boat
• Hamstring cramp
• Leg up... on your competition
• The Great White
• Bundu crawl (if in Zimbabwe)
• Unilateral kick freestyle
• Athletes foot
• Helicopter
• Duck drill
• Ann O'Neill reports that In Scotland, its name is, “the haggis.”

It seems as if, the shark fin name is more suited with the kick board between legs.

Purpose of this drill

The purpose resides between the ears. It is about brain power. The textbook reasoning: Kinetic mastery and a good dose of listening and following directions.

Another purpose of the drill is to build extra physical strength and smiles.

Nancy Harms summed it up by saying coordination, opposition, core strength, body awareness, coach's entertainment.

Stacey O'Neil Rickman talks about up-kick as well as down-kick, core, lines, but also it makes her laugh.

Mark Bennett wrote about balance and stability. If you raise one leg in the back, you have no option but to lower your front end. Now the hard part is getting the core to stabilize and stay long, with out “bowing” in the back, and stretching the obliques.

The drill can be used as a gimmick during warm down when the aim is to get the swimmers to focus, when they are very unlikely to want to focus.

Great drill to do with a snorkel, as well.

Alternatives

Do more than just freestyle with one foot in the air. Do all the strokes that way, especially fun relays.

Freestyle with one foot up in the air is one thing, but amp it up with some IMs. Even 25-yard IMs as well.

Coaching tips:

Describe the activity to the kids by saying you are a waiter holding a tray of food and/or drinks high on your foot and you have to move around the busy dining establishment -- except we're at at swim-up bar. You can't drop the tray that sits on your foot so as to get those cheeseburgers wet. There is no tip for that!

The drill works to aid in workforce development skills. Tip: Have the swimmers walk around the pool with a kick-board trays lifted over their heads holding water bottles on top. Being a waiter/waitress or even bussing tables is a high demand job that requires some skills too.

Do the drill with the head out of water and one foot out of water and called it the "Egyptian Crawl."