Covid Conflicts Bring Swim to a Halt; How Will The Team Respond? By Peter Leary

SEATTLE-Historically the winter break has been a time of hard work for the O’Dea Swim Team. Famously known as the "gift of fitness", it is two weeks of practices that kids put in hard work and lower their times.

This year it seemed to be the same. Going through the season up the break Covid wasn’t a problem. But after a victory over Eastside Catholic on December 17th 2021 the following Monday things seemed to be sliding downhill. A couple people on the team tested positive and like all winter sports, practices were canceled until January 3rd.

“We’re definitely setback and having to make up for what we’ve lost… In turn, causing us to have to work harder to obtain our goals, but we still aim to achieve everything we set out to do,” senior captain Sean Ahearn stated.

The team unfortunately lost the "gift of fitness", which in turn set the team back after a strong month of training. Starting again will be tough given the goals that the team has this year, but with a well rounded team they hope to get back to where they were before.

“Watch out especially for freshman Nick Behrens and Maks Karman, sophomores Jack Skarda and Davis Leclerq and senior captain Owen Weber.”

Luckily the snow storm that rolled through Seattle seems to have helped the team. Given that other schools were continuing practices in the beginning of winter break, with the snow storm they didn’t have the ability to practice. Now the team feels that everyone is on a level playing field.

The team was supposed to compete against Seattle Prep this week for a dual meet at Meadowbrook pool. However due to ongoing Covid complications the meet was cancelled as well as the annual Kentridge invite on Saturday.

With a restart on the season the team will be putting in more hard work to get back to where they were. By not having a meet this week they hope to put in hard practices without worries of a meet on Friday. Making up for lost time will be hard but looking back on the teams history, the culture could make it happen.

“We’re a pretty competitive group of guys all striving to be better than each other, but this is only possible because we’ve implement core team values… Mr. Schutte gives us goal sheets so we can measure our own progress rather than him setting our own progress rather than him setting our goals for us,” Ahern stated.