<p>Both Claudia Chirinos and her husband were soccer players growing up, so when the couple moved with their two young children from California to Franklin, that was the first sport they tried putting their oldest son, Franco, into.</p><p>Franco did not share his parents’ love for the beautiful game.</p><p>"He hated it," Claudia said.</p><p>Next on the list was swimming. Chirinos signed Franco, then 9 years old, up with the Franklin Regional Swim Team, hopeful that he would at least learn how to be safe in the water.</p>[sc:text-divider text-divider-title="Story continues below gallery" ]Click here to purchase photos from this gallery<p>Four years later, the whole Chirinos family has become fully immersed in the world of club swimming, and they’re not alone. The sport has enjoyed tremendous growth around the area in recent years — and while that growth has been most noticeable during the high school season — all five county schools were represented at the state meets in February, with Franklin’s boys and girls both finishing second as a team — Johnson County’s four club organizations are thriving year round.</p><p>Swimming is counter-cultural in many ways; it involves a lot of around-the-clock, around-the-calendar work and doesn’t deliver much in the way of instant gratification. Yet more and more local children are developing a passion for swimming, and their families are doing so right along with them.</p><p>"It’s really kind of cool to see that interest level peak in our community," said Amy Spencer, who heads up the Center Grove Aquatic Club. "We’re putting more kids through our swim lesson program now than we’ve ever put through."</p><p><span><strong>’A hard sell'</strong></span></p><p>Spencer, who has been involved with the Center Grove club (CGAC) since she was about 5 years old, acknowledges that swimming isn’t the easiest sport to fall in love with. For the top-level teenage performers, it can involve double-digit practice hours every week, often at odd hours. So she’s structured her club in a way that doesn’t throw newcomers into the deep end — pun intended — right away.</p><p>"I would not expect a 7-, 8-, 9-year-old to come in and practice five or six times a week for two hours at a time," Spencer said. "Usually about middle school age is when the kids kind of decide whether they want to be all in. And I tell the kids that that’s a decision that they have to make; I will support them in whatever decision."</p><p>With each passing year, more and more kids are showing a desire to go all in.</p><p>Between CGAC, Franklin Regional Swim Team (FRST), the Greenwood Gators and the Indian Creek Aquatic Club (ICAC), there are hundreds of families across Johnson County that have made the pool their second home. Whiteland has a thriving lessons program with numbers at an all-time high; its competitive swimmers usually fan out to either FRST or Greenwood.</p><p>That so many parents are getting their children into swim lessons isn’t surprising; water safety is among the more important life skills a kid can pick up. Many of those who take it to a competitive level and stick with it, though, end up doing so for similar reasons.</p><p>"Swimming is a team sport, yet it’s an individual sport," said Zach DeWitt, the head coach of both FRST and the boys and girls teams at Franklin Community High School. "You get to learn to work with others while you also get to learn about holding yourself accountable, self-discipline, et cetera. It’s the only sport, at least within our constraints of the IHSAA, where boys and girls get to work together — which literally mimics real life. I don’t care what industry you go in, you’re going to work with someone of the opposite gender, and so learning those nuances on how to work with the opposite gender is huge and incredibly rewarding.</p><p>"The other cool thing for me, personally, is that it’s very much like life in terms of, you set goals for yourself and you seek them out. Some kids will work the whole year just for a time up on a record board, and it’s not for anything other than that. I think that that’s really cool."</p><p>Lena Roby, mother of CGAC and Center Grove High School swimmer Tony Gipson, has seen her son develop some of those characteristics over the years. In the past, she might have had to push him out the door to get to practices, but Gipson’s self-motivation has grown as he has.</p><p>The workouts are grueling, but swimmers develop a sort of "we’re all in this together" camaraderie, and so there’s a sense of responsibility to one another.</p><p>"You make a commitment, you follow through," Roby said. "You want to go to practice, because you know your buddies are going to be there, your girlfriends are going to be there … and you don’t want to let them down, because you’re not at practice. So over time, what I’ve seen is, I don’t have to chase Tony to go to practice."</p><p><span><strong>A family business</strong></span></p><p>As the swimmers become more passionate and committed, the parents do too, forming armies of volunteers that do much of the behind-the-scenes dirty work that goes into keeping the clubs afloat.</p><p>Both CGAC and FRST, like many other clubs, set minimum volunteer participation requirements for all club parents. Most clubs host meets during the year, and the entry fees from those meets help to keep the regular costs low for the swimmers. Having enough bodies on hand to fully staff the meets and keep them running smoothly, therefore, is a must. </p><p>"We don’t do fundraisers," said Chirinos, who is in her first full year as the volunteer coordinator for FRST. "We don’t sell candles like other teams, or cookies or whatever. The home meets are like the blood for the team. … Stuff that we do for the kids all comes from that."</p><p>Tasks for the volunteers might include serving as a timer or a deck marshal, staffing the hospitality room or working the concession stand. Over the course of a full-weekend meet with as many as five sessions, a lot of manpower is needed — but at the top clubs, the parents know that it’s important to take as much of that organizational load as possible off of the coaches’ plates.</p><p>"The less the coach spends on some of that administrative business, running a meet and getting it all set up," Roby said, "the more they’re able to focus on the kids in the water, and that makes it better for the swimmers, the parents and the coaches. It just helps everybody."</p><p>"You want to know the difference between the top-flight, blue-blood programs?" DeWitt added. "And you’ll be able to tell as you make the club circuit. Immediately, when you walk into a meet, you’ll be able to tell whether it’s well-run. … It’s not that they’re making a difference in the kids’ times; it’s just that kind of long-term stability is what normally keeps coaches around."</p><p>Indeed, it has kept coaches around in Johnson County. Spencer’s father, Jim Todd, has been coaching at Center Grove for 35 years, and Brad Smith has been at Indian Creek for nearly as long, heading up both the high school program and ICAC.</p><p><span><strong>Seamless transition</strong></span></p><p>Because of the way the IHSAA rules are structured, most Indiana swim programs have a nearly seamless relationship between club and high school teams. Many of the state’s coaches, including Smith and DeWitt, oversee both, and that symbiotic relationship has made Indiana one of the fastest swimming states in the country.</p><p>While the state rules only allow swimmers to compete in two club meets during the high school season, perhaps limiting how well they perform during national club meets in the winter, DeWitt believes that the arrangement is very much a net positive, especially because it allows him to spend a lot more time with his swimmers throughout the year and build relationships.</p><p>"Sometimes I feel like it takes three, four or five months just to get to know a kid," he said, "and so it’s hard for me to believe that if I was coaching softball or football that I would then go nine or eight months without even seeing that same kid. In that case, they’re spending more time away from me than they’re spending with me, and so I think that would limit my ability to make a positive impact in the lives of these kids."</p><p><span><strong>Keeping it tight</strong></span></p><p>Those closer relationships aren’t limited to the ones between coaches and swimmers. Because local teams are competing against one another in both the club and school seasons, Johnson County’s swim community has become an extremely close-knit family across the board.</p><p>Whereas two football or basketball rivals might cross paths a couple of times in a season, the swim teams are seeing each other at least a dozen times over the course of the year — and they’re sharing deck space instead of standing on opposite sidelines.</p><p>The relationships are still competitive, but even rivals will look out for one another.</p><p>"Swimming itself is a small world, and we’re kind of like a big family," Spencer said. "If somebody’s down and needs something, you kind of set aside any of those competitive differences or philosophical coaching differences or whatever it may be."</p><p>That has been particularly noticeable across the county in the case of Chase Smith, an Indian Creek and ICAC swimmer who has been battling cancer for the past five years. Each of the other county programs has reached out with some show of support; FRST, for example, has had a #ChaseStrong lemonade stand set up at each of its home meets this summer, and all of the clubs have encouraged their swimmers and parents to take part in the various fundraisers to support the Smith family.</p><p>"That’s not just the kind of character that Chase has — and he’s an unbelievable person — but that’s also a vote of confidence for his dad and everything that the family has stood for in Johnson County swimming for a long, long time," DeWitt said. "There’s some deep-rooted connections among all the programs."</p><p>Because swimmers dedicate so much time to their craft, many of the families end up seeing each other in the bleachers at practices or meets nearly every day, which ends up strengthening those community bonds even more.</p><p>"We spend so much time in the pool, and we see the swim families — we spend more time with them here at the pool, and we see each other all the time," Chirinos said, "so our kids grow up being like brothers and sisters in the pool because they see each other all the time."</p><p>"We sit together at meets and sweat for four hours," Roby added with a laugh, "to watch your kid swim for a minute and 5 seconds." </p>
