Swimmers talk about what it takes to succeed at state

ANCHORAGE — It’s a given that athletes who make it to the state championships have worked hard to get there, but few know what goes on in a swimmer’s or diver’s head on game day.

Or what they had for breakfast that morning.

The Colony High School Swimming and Diving teams arrived in Anchorage on Friday morning for preliminary competitions, spending the night at the Sheraton Hotel after a dressed-up dinner at Pizza Olympia. Saturday’s wake-up call came at 8 a.m., meaning the team got to “sleep in,” according to sophomore Camille Dayton.

For Dayton, who took second in the 100-meter butterfly this weekend, the meet starts when she begins to visualize her races either the night before or the morning of the final event.

“When it’s really big races like this, I try to picture my races and how I want them to go,” she said.

That could mean focusing on flaws in form, her speed off the blocks and on the turns, or advantages she may have over other swimmers in her event, against whom she’s already competed.

The drive to the pool provides reflection time for most athletes, according to sophomore diver Eileen Cyr.

“On the bus ride it was pretty quiet, it wasn’t like crazy as usual,” she said.

Her teammate, diver Tanner Belliston, however, had no qualms about “talking at everyone,” he said, and secured second place behind two-time state champ Brayden Schachle, a junior at Wasilla.

When they get to the pool around noon, an hour before the start of the meet, the whole Colony swim team does about a 45-minute warm-up together, broken down into segments including 10 minutes of straight swimming, “fast 50s” and 25-yard swims, and time for practicing turns and starts.

Senior Joseph Anderson, who is now the two-time reigning state champ in the 100 breaststroke, said this makes up the bulk of his physical pre-race activities, swimming individual warm-ups just a couple minutes before each of his races (he took third in the 200 individual medley as well, and would’ve been part of a school record-breaking relay team, had they not been disqualified, he said).

As the swimmers warm up, the divers have to do so in their heads, since the length of the pool is being used for the hundreds of athletes that will race before they compete. Cyr, who moved up to sixth from last year’s ninth-place finish, tends to focus herself with some tunes.

“I listen to music to get prepped and pumped up,” she said.

Though the divers have a lot more downtime than the swimmers, Cyr said, the former fill the gaps by discussing their dives with each other and cheering on teammates.

That cheering, Dayton said, can help drive her on and drive out the nerves (and keep her fruit-filled breakfast from coming up later).

“It gets me excited,” she said.

As hard as it may be to believe that the athletes can’t hear the din of hundreds of students, parents and coaches screaming encouragement during a given race, Palmer senior Millie Snelders at least said she tunes the whole thing out.

“It’s fun when I’m cheering people on but when I’m swimming I don’t pay any attention to it,” she said.

Unlike the Colony team, Snelders and her brother Max (who finished fourth in the 50 free this year) chose to sleep in their own beds the night before the final day of competition. Though they may not have had the opportunity to eat “pretty much everything you can imagine” at a hotel buffet before their races (which Anderson claimed to have done), Millie Snelders said she was satisfied with her trusty banana with peanut butter and later some strawberry Clif Shot Blocks.

Though there were some tears seen at the pool on Saturday — perhaps to be expected at such level of competition — Cyr, Snelders, Dayton and Belliston agreed it was important to have fun. Most if not all of the 30 or so Valley swimmers and divers had smiles on their faces throughout the meet, shaking hands, thanking and cheering on not only their own teammates but athletes and event staff they didn’t know.

Snelders said that’s all part of what makes a state championship meet special.

“(At state), everyone’s gonna swim fast, they’re tapered and … this is what everyone’s been training for,” she said. “The energy is just bouncing off the walls.”

Contact reporter Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.