Winhawk Varsity heads to Big 9

The Winona Winhawk Girl's Swimming Team heads to Albert Lea Saturday to contest the Big 9 Championship.

Swimming is an odd team sport. Unlike many other sports, the dual season meet part of the season doesn't mean a lot, for a number of reasons.

1) Regardless of your dual meet record, your team gets to swim in the Conference meet.

2) Team results in Conference have little effect on Sections.

3) Sections Championships are everything. They determine whether you get to swim at state. You either place high enough in an event’s finishing results or by swimming the required time standard.

As such, Conference is a stepping stone, and a different one for different teams and swimmers.

Swimmers taper at the end of the season. A taper is "the reduction of workload during a period immediately prior to a major competition." During the first three weeks of a taper (according to studies) changes that occurred were "increases in power, neuromuscular efficiency, anaerobic contribution of the swim, fast twitch muscle recruitment, and mechanical efficiency."

For different swimmers, their major competition may be Conference, it may be Sections, and it may be State. Why is explained by the opportunities to swim in the post season. There are limits on the number of entries allowed in meets. In duals it is based on the number of lanes in the pool. For championship meets, teams are limited to four individual entries per event and one per relay. With a large squad, they may not be able to swim everyone at Sections, so for some of their swimmers, their last meet would be Conference. As such they would be tapered or rested, probably even shaved (Shaving down has been a long-time companion of the taper. Shaving down for a swim meet is for gaining an advantage of a few tenths of a second. Just what does shaving body hair do? Shaving results in faster swims independent of training. The advantages of shaving are related to a decrease in drag to be overcome by a swimmer. The final result is that less power application in the pull pattern is required to overcome that drag.). Yes, I believe some of the girls have not shaved their legs for a month or two.


So some swimmers will be tapered for Conference. Possibly skewing the results of who really is faster.


Also, our conference has both Class A and Class AA teams as members. So at Sections and State they are held to different standards, yet at Conference they are all swimming to one standard, best time.


Conference is a fun meet, there are rivalries, they are the same swimmers that they raced against earlier in the season in dual meets, and maybe mostly, it is about bragging rights.

 And what swimmer doesn't like that!