By Darcy DeGuise
One-hundredth of a second: it’s the difference between a fingertip touch and a palm plant on the wall. It’s the difference between the state swim competition or the end of the season. Time is the only enemy of a swimmer, and her goal is always to shave it off the clock.
Time is what defined the 2021-2022 swim season for the Pagosa Springs High School Girls’ Swim Team.
Many readers of the Pagosa Daily Post may not even be aware that Pagosa Springs High School has a girls’ swim team. Since adding this winter sport four years ago in compliance with Title 9, this talented, committed, and resilient group of young women have not only solidified this program, but they have done it while overcoming great adversity. All the while they have been true role models and exceptional students, demonstrating flexibility and strength under pressure.
When the COVID-19 Pandemic shut down schools in March 2020, having any swim season was precarious at best. In November of that year, we were cleared to swim, but the landscape of swimming had changed. Swimmers were required to wear masks at all times except when in the water, no overnight swim meets were allowed, and the use of locker rooms was prohibited. These girls persevered, despite the mandates and minutia, only to have a COVID outbreak on the team end the season before our Western Slope Regional Swim Meet. No one thought it could get any worse.
Fast forward to July 2021: the swim pool we use at the PLPOA Rec Center starts to undergo renovations, including cosmetic refurbishes and an overhaul of the plumbing system. Unfortunately, because of the backlog in construction projects, this process was exceedingly slow. In October, both the coaches and the athletic director of the school district were scrambling to find a pool in order to save yet another season for this newly added sport. We were, again, racing against time to garner a facility.
Help did not come from a local pool owner. Instead, the City of Durango offered their rec center to our team. We would get to swim two hours a week (in a normal season, we swim 8 – 10 hours per week) and would have to drive the swimmers on a school mini bus to and from the pool. We were spending five hours a week on a bus, to swim two hours.
On the days we didn’t swim, Margaret Burkesmith offered a yoga class and Josh Kurz, Rachael Christensen, and Lindsey Kurt-Mason taught the girls how to skate ski.
While this was, by no means, a “regular season,” many positive results came from it. Some of our swimmers found a love for yoga, an activity many of them had never tried before. This was the same with skate skiing. Although there was more falling than in yoga, there were more laughs, as well. Spending a minimum of five hours each week on a bus (or more when we would have a meet in any particular week), allowed us to get to know one another on a much different level than if we had simply spent that time in the pool. It only further solidified my love for these young women and for this sport. We developed a level of comfort with each other, listening, laughing, sharing snacks, offering advice and support, and learning to find the positive in each situation presented to us. Besides that, we also witnessed tremendous successes: every swimmer consistently dropped time in her events throughout the season, swimmers challenged themselves with events and strokes they had never swum before, and we had one of the most successful regional meets since the swim team’s inception.
Our season ended on February 5, 2022, when two of our junior swimmers failed to qualify for the state championship meet: one by 83 hundredths (.83) of a second and the other by one-hundredth (.01) of a second. This was an amazing accomplishment even though it was a bittersweet end to a season wrought with difficulties.
Hopefully, with more time to train next season, you’ll read about a number of swimmers heading to state in 2023.
Darcy DeGuise teaches English at Pagosa Springs High School.