The swim team is already making waves, starting this season with 108-62 and 114-61 wins for boys and girls, respectively, against La Costa Canyon (LCC), March 7.
Julia Souza (11), who dominated the 200m freestyle and 100m butterfly events, said that the girls’ win was anticipated.
“We beat LCC last year, so we were expecting the same to happen,” Souza said. “Their team is pretty much the same from last year: They don’t have anyone that’s really fast, [and] their team is pretty small.”
Souza said she focused mainly on self-improvement during the meet.
“We were all just trying to start the season off right,” she said. “We had some goals set in our heads for what [times] we wanted to [get] at that meet, so I was just trying to have fun. When we have dual meets [like this one], my main goal is always to learn as much as I can from every race, whether that’s how many kicks I’m going to take, or how many strokes, or a race plan.”
Co-captain Kai Snyder (12) said that the boys were a bit more pessimistic after last year’s narrow loss.
“As a team captain, my job was to bring everyone up and assure that we were confident that we were going to win this year,” Snyder said. “I didn’t want [the team] to go into a losing mentality, so I tried my best to [tell them], ‘We’ve put in the dedication, we put in the hours, and we’re going to take what’s ours this year.’”
According to freestyle swimmer Bowen Gurwitt (10), LCC had one main strength: a swimmer, Quinn Delaney, who specialized in long-distance events like the 500 free, 200 individual medley, and 200 free.Snyder said that by ensuring their lineup was strong across the board, the team was able to come in either first or second in every event this swimmer participated in.
“It was less of a battle of events and more a battle of swimmers,” he said. “We just [had] to make sure that all events we swam were to the best of our abilities, so it was less of [us] getting ready for [this swimmer] and more [that] we were going to train our hardest anyways, regardless of who’s on the other side of the lane.”
During their training, Snyder worked to keep morale high through an unexpected inconvenience: the pool’s broken heating system.
“One of [the] days, we hopped into the pool, not knowing it was broken, and everyone was complaining about how they were shrinking, like they were shriveled up because of how cold it was,” Snyder said.
For the week after ski week, the team practiced at Del Norte, which, according to Souza, was inconvenient for them, as they were accustomed to Westview’s atmosphere.
Snyder helped the team adapt by bringing aspects of usual practices to the Nighthawks’ pool deck.
“We essentially made Del Norte a second home, or a home away from home,” Snyder said. “I was just trying to make it as comfortable [as possible], so I would do the same things I did at Westview at Del Norte: I would play music, I would hype the team up, and we would all huddle, just small things that make you feel like a team wherever.”
Snyder said he believes this camaraderie was important to the team’s success during LCC, and will be for the rest of the season.
“I think that even if swim is a very individual sport, there are ways to incorporate leadership and incorporate teamwork to help each other,” he said. “Leadership in swimming is about bringing everyone together as a team — not necessarily a group of athletes, but a team.”
According to breaststroke and freestyle swimmer Yuchen Wang (10), the team’s club swimmers and high-school-only swimmers have, in years past, been known to be disconnected.
“There’s a little bit [of a divide] because if you’re a club swimmer, they encourage you to go to club practice instead of high-school practice, so there’s definitely less bonding between club swimmers and high-school-only swimmers,” he said.
When these groups are joined, Snyder said, the team is a force to be reckoned with.
“It’s like bringing two houses together,” he said. “Club swimmers practice their hardest and we practice our hardest at Westview, and when we come together for a meet, there’s no bad blood, but we put both halves together and then we crush other teams.”
This year, Gurwitt said this unity is key to rebuilding after the loss of valuable seniors.
“Last year we had a lot of good seniors,” Gurwitt said. “Now that they left this year, it’s made a decent difference because we’re going to have to fill in that gap, especially in relay events where they have more experience. It’s going to be a challenge, but it can give us a good opportunity to become better as a team.”
Wang said this year’s team is already proving themselves capable of stepping up and even surpassing last year’s records.
“I think because a lot of our best swimmers last year were freshmen [and] are sophomores this year, we’re just getting better in general,” he said. “My hope is that we go undefeated because looking at our dual-meet schedule, I don’t think there’s a team that we’re not better than.”
According to Snyder, since the team has the skills needed to accomplish this, their success hinges on their mentality.
“If you’re going into a meet thinking that you’re going to fail, then you’re going to swim in a way that reflects that mentality,” Snyder said. “You’re not going to be swimming to win, you’re going to be swimming to not lose. I was trying to redirect the team to think [that] you should be swimming to win — you’re not swimming away from something, you’re swimming towards something.”
