The swim season has finally begun after its sudden pause last year. Despite the obstacles present this past year, the teams excelled during regionals and continue to practice on becoming better each day.

Despite facing a pandemic, both the boys and girls swim team won Districts, defending their title of district champion.

“I’m really proud of our team,” junior Jennifer Villanueva said. “We worked really hard and I’m glad it payed off.”

After being named District Champions, the swim team advanced to Regionals, which were held two weeks ago.

“We won district, but when you get to regionals, you’re competing against other teams that also won their district. The ones that were our ‘best swimmers’ knew that they were going to advance from district to region, and they were aiming for the regional meet” said swim coach Stephen McDonald.

Many students did well at Regionals.

“Megan Lewis had a great anchor leg on the four by one-hundred freestyle relay, Lauren Howe dropped from one minute to fifty-eight seconds in the one-hundred yard backstroke, which is a top ten time at Lamar. At regionals the girls finished in fourth place, and so did the boys. Mack Newval had a fifty-seven second one-hundred yard breaststroke, which almost got them to the state meet,” McDonald said.

Although last year the season was cut short, this year the swimming team has kept up with their activities and continued to advance and practice.

“As a team we can put as many as four people in an event, they race the other people from the other team, and in whatever place they finish that determines the number of points that they score for the team” said McDonald.

Because of Covid, practices are currently split up, so the swimmers are offered different times to practice.

“Coach Mac comes in the morning, so we have a before school morning practice. They [swimmers] are all enrolled in our P. E. class, they come during the day to practice, we also have practice afterschool, in the afternoons” said swim coach Dana Keller.

The swim team has taken many Covid-19 precautions to ensure that they do not have an outbreak.

“In the lanes we have a pattern in the lights, so we can never have more than three people in the lane, two people would be on one end of the pool, and one on the other end of the pool,” said Coach Mac. “A mask is required outside of the pool, if they’re [swimmers] are on the bleachers waiting to swim they have their mask on” said Coach Dana Keller, when asked about the measures taken to prevent the spread of Covid-19.