The Week Ahead: 8.21 to 8.26

Comparison is the thief of joy.

~Theodore Roosevelt~

Thanks to everyone who helped to make our retreat this year a success! Big thanks to the Edewaard family for hosting our overnight (with "supervision" from the DeYoungs...) and providing our dinner and breakfast. Also, big thanks goes out to the Hirdes family and the Douthitt family for providing their boats and tubes for our Saturday afternoon fun, as well as the Franz and Zylstra families for providing our lunch and plenty of snack food. Overall, it's just a great 24 hours spent together, talking plenty about our team and our expectations and goals for this year, but also just having fun and being ourselves and getting to know each other outside the pool. We heard some impactful stories and set some great expectations for our culture this year. I'm excited to see where our 2017 squad can go!

And now...school! This week brings a lot of change for all of us: classes start, overall daily schedules get shaken up from our summer routines, and we have our first meet. As we head into the 2017/18 school year, we need to make sure that we get on-top of things right away to set a good foundation for the weeks and months to come. We spent some time discussing self-care this weekend: getting enough sleep, prioritizing with school in the mix, staying hydrated and fueled-up, etc. If we can get off to a good start and make these things habits right away once we get into our school schedule, they'll serve us well throughout the season.

Also, on Tuesday...our FIRST MEET! Certainly, there's plenty of excitement around finally getting to compete. We get to race, complete our first 6-dive list, cheer plenty, and feel the adrenaline that comes from a meet. It's going to be FUN for sure! However, we also need a caution, which is where our quote comes in for the week: this meet merely marks the starting point for our 2017 journey. It's tempting to compare times and scores and places to last year...don't do it. It's a new season, we're a different team and different people this time around, and things are going to be just different. It's good to see where we're starting from, and then we need to remind ourselves that it's August, and we have three months of work ahead of us to get where we're going.

Monday 8.21

• Check-In Day at the High School!
• This goes from 11:30am to 5:00pm.  
• Make sure you get there as early as possible!  Lines for pictures, laptops, etc. tend to get backed-up.  Be sure to give yourself plenty of time so you can get to practice on-time.

Tuesday 8.22

• Meet AWAY @ Calvin vs. Grand Rapids Christian and Calvin Christian.
• Bus leaves at 4:45pm from the Pool.
• We dress up for away meets! This means no jeans.
• Warm Up @ 6:00pm. Meet Starts @ 7:00pm.
• Note: This is 30 minutes later than our normal meets.
• We found out last week that this got changed to a  double-dual. There will be two heats of some events, but not everything, so it should be fairly timely run even with the later start.

Saturday 8.26

• Our First Saturday Practice! This is for both swimmers AND divers!
• TIME CHANGE! In the water from 8:00 to 10:00am.
• Breakfast to follow, so give yourself more time afterwards for the meal.
• SEASON SCHEDULE CHANGE
• In order to get a full 6 lanes on Saturdays, we will be alternating time slots with Holland. The normal two slots are 7 to 9 and 9 to 11. Once Holland starts mornings, these are the times we will alternate between. The Google Calendar has these correctly updated now.