On my first real day as a Wolverine, I arrived at the Westview pool ready for my first day of playing on a high school sports team. On that day I biked to the gates of the Westview pool, 20 minutes before my first high school summer pre-season water polo practice, and sat down with my bike and my quiet excitement to be stepping into the world I had always wanted to join. As I waited for the tsunami of newness to arrive, I felt comfortable sitting next to a very old, dear friend: the Westview pool.

In this same pool, seven years earlier, I learned how to swim. In this pool, one and a half years earlier, I was first introduced to water polo in a head-spinning, chaotic, and extremely tiring practice that marked the start of something that would come to define a part of who I am. In this pool, three months earlier, I watched, with my club teammates, the boys water polo team, during one of their matches, elevate the sport to what seemed like the level of titans. My first encounters with the Westview pool never ceased to amaze me, and leave me in a state of awe and admiration.

While many of my peers came to Westview with significant unfamiliarity, I had the pool as my anchor.

After this contemplative wait in the dogged early August heat, my first high school coach and some of the team arrived for our first practice. As we shuffled in, a tall member of the varsity team, who I later learned was the starting goalie, came up to me and told me a little bit about the team and what high school water polo is all about. This was the first time any member of any high school team had talked to me like I was one of them. I was honored. I later found out his name was Ethan Woelbern (’23). Over the course of the season and school year, I looked up to him for both his water polo and journalistic abilities, writing for The Nexus. The admiration forged on that first day is in part why I joined this very paper I am writing in now. This connection marked the first time I ever really felt welcome at Westview. It also inspired me to do the same for so many others, to be that first person to reach out and welcome someone.

The pool has served as a guide and entry into all the other things I have come to love about this school.

In addition to this first connection, the pool brought me friends from the water polo team whom I still keep in touch with, and will always stay connected to like a group of brothers.. 

Over the years, no matter what turbulence I may arrive at the pool with–its serene vastness under a sunset at hundreds of late afternoon water polo practices, or its quiet grace in the complete darkness at early morning swim practices–it has been the one constant in this period of my life with so much change.

In the ensuing years of hundreds of practices and thousands of hours spent in and around this pool, I have developed an appreciation for it unlike any that I have ever felt for any other place. I have swum hundreds of miles within its small bounds, just looking at its familiar floor. To me, the rust spots, band-aids, hair ties, and plain dark blue tiled lap lines bring comfort to the long hours of solitude that are required for lap swimming. 

So, after the excited, chaotic rush of graduation ceremonies is over, I will return to the gates of the Westview pool. I will sit with myself, full of new hopes and aspirations and say goodbye to my very old, dear friend, to that first place to welcome me. 

Goodbye, Westview pool.

Love, 

Robbie