This story originally appeared in the April 4 edition of The Saratoga Falcon.
With new coaches this season, the swim team has undergone a lot of startling changes, but even further changes awaited the team with an internal swap of coaching.
Coach Cristin Reichmuth, who initially started out coaching the entirety of the JV team, took up coaching all the girls on the team while coach Christian Bonner, who instructed the varsity team at the beginning of the season, is now coaching the male swimmers.
“The two coaches are both really good, but they have completely different methods,” said senior Kimi Hosseinian. “[Reichmuth] is more about making us work our butts off with really hard, fast-paced sets while [Bonner] has short, efficient sets that really focus on stroke-work.”
But despite these sudden changes in coaching styles, the team hopes to use the varying methods to their advantage.
“It’s good to have two coaches who have different approaches to swimming,” said senior Alison Wu. “This way, we’re able to have more opinions on how to improve our strokes.”
Along with the new coaches comes a new responsibility for the team itself: organizing the swimmer line-up for meets.
Throughout previous years, former coach Kristen Thomson dealt with this task, but due to the unfamiliarity that new coaches often face with such a large number of swimmers, organizing the line-up has fallen upon veteran members of the team.
“This year, we have a lot of say in our line-up,” said Hosseinian. “We get to change it up for every meet, which eventually allows everyone to swim the events they want to swim.”
Even with all the new changes this year regarding coaching and line-up, the team still hopes to succeed throughout the season.
“Change is good,” said Wu. “I’m sure we’ll be able to use it all to our advantage.”
3/15 Saratoga 137, Monta Vista 213
The team dealt with last-minute changes to line-up, which complicated the start of the meet.
“No one was sure of what they were swimming, so it was a bit confusing to begin with,” said Wu. “Even minutes before the meet [was to start], we were finding mistakes within the line-up.”
The team managed to fix the errors and successfully finish the meet without any other complications.
“Overall, I don’t think the line-up issue affected our team’s ability,” said Wu.
The varsity boys dominated the 200-yard freestyle where senior Ryan Hinshaw placed first with a time of 1:48.71, freshman Adam Hinshaw took second at 1:48.80 and junior Matt Murray placed third in 1:50.59.
The Hinshaw brothers later swept the 500-yard freestyle event. Junior Ben Hinshaw took first with a leading time of 4:44.47, A. Hinshaw placed second at 4:47.81 and R. Hinshaw came in third in 5:02.83.
On the girls’ team, senior Hayes Hyde placed first in both 200-yard freestyle and 100-yard butterfly events with times of 2:00.98 and 59.89 respectively. Sophomore Lauren Opatrny also won the 200-yard individual medley event in 2:09.92.
Despite these individual wins, the team still faced an overall loss.
The team also competed against Lynbrook last Friday, but due to printing deadlines, results could not be reported.