Coaches’ philosophy

To be a member of the Elk River swimming and diving team is a privilege.  

It involves making certain sacrifices--attending all practices, avoiding pop and choosing healthy foods, following curfews, keeping up with academics and working hard.  

It means that you swim as the coach and team asks, do the workouts and meet warmups as written, and follow all rules and guidelines set up by the coaching staff and the Minnesota State High School League.

To be a member of the Elk River High School team, a swimmer or diver must devote his efforts to this team.  You will swim the workouts, including the pre-meet warmups.  You will swim the team’s meet lineups.  You will complete the season with the team which includes training and tapering for the high school junior varsity, section and state meets. 

Team benefits

Joining the team also has its benefits:  the chance to earn a high school letter, the experience of a team environment, meeting new friends, the chance to compete in many meets in a short period of time, to experience different coaching styles, and recognition in schools and newspapers.  

We hope you enjoy swimming with the high school as well.  We want to make the swim team experience a fun and enjoyable one.

Team connections

Each team member will be paired with a team brother. We will pair all rookies with veterans to create team connections and learn about team culture. 

We encourage the parents of the pairs to contact each other for guidance, and as another contact for answering questions and welcoming them to the “family”. 

Meets

So How do Meets work…

Most of our meets are dual meets, which means two teams compete against each other.

The JV heat of the event is run first, then the varsity heat.  Some times there will be an “exhibition” heat, which would precede the JV heat.  Dual meets take about 2 hours to complete depending on the numbers of divers.

The order of events is always the same:

200 Medley Relay:  4 swimmers doing 50 yards (2 lengths) of the pool in the following order:

backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly, freestyle

200 Freestyle (8 lengths)

200 Individual Medley (IM) 50 yards each of butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, and freestyle in that order

50 freestyle

Diving (6 dives per diver) Judges scores are totaled, then multiplied by degree of difficulty (DD)

Usually a 10-15 minute warm up is provided for the swimmers before the swimming events resume

100 butterfly (4 lengths)

100 freestyle

500 freestyle (20 lengths)

200 freestyle relay (4x50)

100 backstroke

100 breaststroke

400 freestyle relay (4x100)

Each team can enter 3 relays or swimmers to possibly score.

Scoring:  

For relays, only the top 3 earn points, and only two relays per team can score. 1st place 8 points, 2nd place 4 points, 3rd place 2 points.

For individual events, 5 places score.  1st 6 points, 2nd 4 points, 3rd 3 points, 4th 2 points, 5th 1 point.

Mathematically, the meet is won when a team reaches 93 points before the last event.  Usually, a team will stop scoring (swim the events as exhibition) after reaching that point total rather than running up the score.  It is a sportsmanship thing…

On a rare occasion, a swim meet will end in a tie score (93-93). 

A swimmer can be disqualified in an event for various reasons, the most common being an illegal turn, stroke or finish.  Various rules govern how each stroke needs to be performed.  If a relay is disqualified, it is usually because of a false start on a relay exchange.