Saturday October 22nd marked the unofficial kick off of meet season for the Intro, Intro Comp, Bronze, Silver and Gold groups with our annual HHBF Blue and White Meet. My initial observations was how much better this meet runs now than it did 3 or 4 years ago! I believe this is for a few reasons:
- Chris Henderson and Shannan Andrews have prepared the athletes very well! Fewer and fewer of them find this meet (for some of the intro groups, this is their first meet experience) overwhelming. Chris and Shannan are also very enthusiastic and energetic people and these athletes feed upon that. The junior coaches were doing their jobs very well! I'm pretty sure that everyone had a great time as a result.
- Our athletes from the Regional Development, Elite and Platinum groups were there volunteering their time which made the day run much smoother. Nothing helps more than having volunteers who know how meets run.
- Parent volunteers were outstanding! We had no shortage of help at all Saturday morning.
- The older athletes were very helpful with the younger athletes. I can't put into words how proud it makes me to see older athletes like Emilie Knighton helping with the younger kids just because she wants to be a good team mate. Athletes like that make a huge difference in the development of this club!
- There was a lot of pretty quick swimming from these younger athletes! I can't wait to kick off the official meet season.
Thank you everyone for all of your help on Saturday, we could not have run such a great meet without you. Historically I do not involve myself directly with the Blue or White team, but instead spent time floating around, fixing problems and putting out fires. This season, things ran so well, it freed me up to closely watch a lot of the races and I must say, I'm very happy with what I see coming up the pipeline for HHBF.
UPDATE: Thank you, Rob Copeland, for the pictures
Scary Update: That was my 200th post. My how time flies!
