Valley swimmers need to go off deep end

The Valley has two pools. Three schools use these pools. Before April 2002 one of the pools was legal to hold official high school swim meets. Now neither of them are legal. Wasilla has a meter pool and high school meets are held in yards. That leaves Wasilla hosting few swim meets. This swim season Wasilla will hold a total of two meets: The "practice" swim meet at the end of August, and Senior Sendoff on Oct. 26. The Palmer Pool usually hosts the Valley Invitational, which is a preview of region competition, Senior Sendoff, when not held at Wasilla, and the Region III swim meet, now held every fifth year in Palmer. As one can see this doesn't provide much for home meets. However, the Valley Invitational is a big money maker for the Palmer High Swim Team.

Unfortunately, this past April the National Federation of State High School Associations reaffirmed their decision from November 2001. That decision was "to no longer permit starting platforms in water less than four feet deep," as stated in the NFHS Officials' Quarterly Fall 2002, making the Palmer Pool illegal to host swim meets. Since the change is for safety concerns, the decision is understandable. Also, with newcomers to swimming, the deeper the starting end of the pool the better -- inexperienced swimmers tend to dive deeper. Colony High's swim team coach Dawn Brettrager agrees. "New swimmers either do one extreme or the other, belly flops or straight down. It takes a lot of practice to be able to control the body," Brettrager said.

One easy solution for the Palmer Pool would have been just to switch to the other end of the pool so the starting blocks were in the deep end. This avoided shutting down the pool for multiple days while it was drained, fixed and then refilled. This solution would have worked if the bulkhead was just a tiny bit narrower, or the wall of lane six was just a few inches. When the bulkhead is pushed as far as it can go in the shallow end, the distance from the bulkhead to the starting end is just shy of the required length of 25 yards. Two starting blocks were installed in the deep end for Colony and Palmer swim teams to use for practice starts.

Practicing starts in the deep end has advantages. Brettrager said the advantages to practicing dives in the deep end are "less safety risks; there is not the fear factor and swimmers are more apt to attempt new things." While in the 13 years that lifeguard Ed Nutter has been at the Palmer Pool he knows of three diving accidents in the shallow end. "One of them ended in death, and the other two came out with just scrapes or abrasions. More people acquire abrasions from swimming from the shallow end up the little incline to the baby pool," he said.

Brettrager witnessed one starting accident, "not under my coaching though, and I'd like to keep it that way. She [the injured girl] is still swimming, though, and is now on my team."

Since the Palmer Pool is illegal, the Valley Invitational had to be moved to another legal pool or canceled. Thankfully Soldotna High School swim team will host the meet. That way Region III swim teams will not lose what could be a very valuable preview to the Region Swim Meet in November. This gives Valley teams one more opportunity to travel. Although, there is still next year's season to think about.

Whitney Bostick is a junior at Palmer High School.