<strong>“I</strong>’m scared to death, to be quite honest.”
Indian Creek swimming and diving coach Brad Smith didn’t dance around it when asked whether he had concerns about his team’s season being impacted by the worsening COVID-19 pandemic.
And he’s got good reason to worry. With coronavirus numbers hitting alarming highs across Indiana — the state had the worst infection rate in the country last week, according to The COVID Tracking Project — and more than half of the counties in the state now in the red on the color-coding chart, in-person schooling and high school athletics are on shakier ground than they’ve been since the spring, when an entire season was wiped out.
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Despite that grim landscape, local swim coaches are relatively confident that their season will continue toward the finish line.
“If only one sport survives COVID, it’s got to be swimming,” Whiteland coach Alec DeWitt said. “We can run it virtually. We could have no fans and still run it virtually. We could have it in separate locations and still swim the meet, so they can still get their times.”
That belief is not without merit. Of all indoor sports, swimming is almost certainly the safest to continue with during this pandemic because transmission in chlorinated pool water is next to impossible. A study conducted by the New Jersey Swim Safety Alliance, which has tracked transmission statistics from 60 different facilities in that state since early July, shows that zero COVID-19 infections have stemmed directly from those venues despite more than 327,000 cumulative visitors during that time.
That does not, however, mean that the coast is entirely clear. No matter how safe swimmers might be during practices and meets, they still need to navigate their school schedules and their everyday lives, which are generally quite a bit more chlorine-free. And that journey has not been without its share of potholes; each of the five county swim programs has had at least one swimmer or diver on quarantine at some point since preseason practices started due to positive tests or contact tracing.
And of all winter athletes, swimmers arguably have the most to lose from a two-week shutdown because of how carefully planned their training is. Everything is scheduled to ensure peak performance for the big postseason meets in February, and any interruption — especially as teams get into their heavy-yardage practices in the second half of December and start tapering down from there — would be a crippling blow.
Center Grove coach Jim Todd, whose girls team had to cancel its first two meets last month because approximately 20 girls had to quarantine during the preseason, feels as though the point of no return would come in January, once swimmers are a month or less away from the sectional meet.
“I haven’t thought that far ahead,” Todd said, “but I would think anybody who’s quarantined in January, that’s going to be tough on them.”
Realistically, the tipping point is likely different for each swimmer depending on a variety of factors. Franklin coach Zach DeWitt believes, based on how the two-month spring hiatus impacted his swimmers before pools re-opened in early June, that sprinters would probably be able to recover more quickly from two weeks off than distance swimmers would — and boys could generally come back more easily than girls because of the typical differences in muscle mass.
“You don’t want to taper a girl as long as you do a boy in any situation,” he said, “and so keeping that concept aligned with the scenarios we’re talking about, it just makes sense that you would not want that to happen for a girl. It would be more detrimental for them.”
Though not every coach might agree on the particulars of who might be affected most by quarantine time or when the layoff would be most damaging, they all concur that there would be a nonzero impact.
Thus, they’re all trying to avoid it as best they can — especially through the next three weeks.
“We’re always onto the guys about making sure they’re social distancing, they’re being smart when they’re out of school and they’re at home, or even on holidays,” Greenwood girls coach Brooke Thompson said. “With us coming up on the holiday season, we’ve had to have a lot of talks with them about making sure that, even when we’re at family outings, we’re wearing our masks and we’re keeping each other safe. That way, when we come back, we don’t impact the team in a way where it’s going to really derail our season.”
Some are taking extra precautions.
Greenwood senior Grace Nuhfer, who has a reasonable chance of cracking the state’s top eight in the 100-yard butterfly this season, has been doing all of her schoolwork virtually to avoid getting caught up in a contact-tracing web at the high school.
The idea of steering top swimmers toward online learning for that reason has certainly crossed the mind of a few local coaches, but that’s not the preferred path.
“I don’t want to tell kids to go all virtual, because they’re students first, and I don’t want their grades to suffer,” Alec DeWitt said. “I do want them to perform well in the pool … but I don’t want to sacrifice — because obviously, a teacher in person, being in class in person, they’re going to perform way better. So I’ve thought about it, but I’m just going to leave that up to the school corporation and the parents themselves. That’s not for me to decide.”
“I’m a teacher; I want my kids in school,” Smith added. “I think we’re operating at the highest standards in school. But it’s tough when, at no fault of their own, they could be quarantined for 14 days and be out of — especially at this point, from here on out, 14 days, that’s two weeks of training.”
From a big-picture standpoint, though, area coaches remain fairly confident that the season can continue on despite any landmines that might pop up. A great deal of planning went into practice and meet management, and events should only run more smoothly as schools continue to figure out what works well and what doesn’t. Next week’s Johnson County meet, for example, is being broken up into three different sessions, with diving on Friday night and separate girls and boys meets on Saturday.
While nothing for February is set in stone yet, the IHSAA is considering similar separations, along with other possible wrinkles, for sectionals and state. Assistant commissioner Kerrie Schludecker, who oversees the swimming postseason, says the hope is that a format can be agreed upon for state that will allow swimmers to compete safely without forcing too much deviation from a “normal” meet routine. She is consulting with the IU Natatorium and other state associations as part of the brainstorming process.
“Missouri, they invited 24 athletes per event, whereas here in Indiana, we invite 32; I don’t want to see that decrease,” Schludecker said. “So to accommodate that, 32 athletes per event, as well as alternates … we would probably have to have — probably three (preliminary) sessions on that Friday.
“Obviously, this is not set in stone. This is just, ‘How can we pull this off?’”
Zach DeWitt, who hosted three other teams for the annual Hall of Fame Classic last weekend, says that while he’s certain more challenges will come up, he still believes the postseason can and will be contested. He believes that by the time Franklin hosts girls and boys sectionals in February, the school’s protocols will be “really well honed in.”
The catch, of course, is that fans will almost certainly not be allowed to attend. That’s not what anyone involved wants, but at postseason meets with more swimmers competing, the bleacher space will likely be needed for staging the teams in a suitably distanced fashion — and just having the meet is a much higher priority than having anyone there to watch it.
“Our allegiance at the end of the day is to the athletes and making them able to finish out their season,” Zach DeWitt said.
At this point, though, nobody is taking anything for granted. The swimmers, who already had to endure almost the entire spring with no access to a pool, are trying their best to savor every bit of this season knowing full well it could all end at any time.
“Right now, with everything going on, making sure we’re living in the moment, making the most out of practices, out of meets,” Nuhfer said. “We never know when it’s going to be our last one, and we want to look back on swim season and think, ‘Man, despite everything, that was so much fun.’ I think that’s the main goal right now — to work hard, and just show up and have fun.”
Of course, the goal is to be able to get each swimmer to the finish line, whether that means sectional or state. Even if the meets do go on as scheduled, they might not go on for everybody — so for the next two months, swimmers will be trying to weave their way through their daily routines without getting dragged into a season-shattering quarantine.
More than in any other year, being lucky might be just as important as being good.
“We’ll just hold our breath and continue,” Smith said. “Around here, we’re pretty good at just living on the anxious edge.”
